Reminds me of the time I installed Visual Studio 2015. That pig sprayed over 30 GB of files onto my HDD and still needed 3rd party plugins to be on the same level as IntelliJ.

That's a bit excessive, did you install all of the vs stuff (all languages & tools including c++, office dev tools, silverlight, light switch etc)? If you just choose C# it's a bit better (though still big). And yes you still need Resharper, ironically made by JetBrains, for it to be on the level of IntelliJ.

VS2015's installer is notoriously uncustomisable - it installs a bunch of useless stuff without letting you choose.

https://visualstudio.uservoice.com/forums/121579-visual-stud...

It's amazing how one man's "pig" can be a ton of other people's "best IDE that there is".

At least in the case of Visual Studio...I don't hear quite as many people naming IntelliJ as "the best". Not even close.

The only people I hear calling Visual Studio "the best" are usually .NET developers. Considering their lack of choices I'm not surprised.

Anecdotal counterpoint: I develop java and python at work, C# and C++ at home, use / have used Eclipse, IntelliJ, ST + plugins, vim, Visual Studio Code, and Visual Studio for development. Of all of the above, I've found that Visual Studio is by far the most pleasant to work in environment (for C# and C++), hands down.

That has nothing to do with the JVM. It's simply a result of it being a very feature-rich IDE.

It may. Java io stack is quite bad at certain tasks like crawling files and tracking changes.

On my experience, the blame is more between chair, keyboard and monitor than with JVM itself, given the typical codebases I have to review for quality issues.

eh, any app that maintains compatibility with jdks < 7 can't use the WatchService and it's low level system specific API, which includes buttload of enterprise app and but the most recents IDE that are starting to drop jdk 6 support.

then there is indeed the PEBCAK as you say, but you can't really blame people that knows the proper solutions if they have weird jdk to support.

Just two examples of such PEBCAK quality:

- Using a for loop to copy array contents instead of System.arraycopy()

- Doing everything on the main thread in Swing

There are plenty more that I can list and they never have anything to do with JDK versions.

That problem was solved in the JDK five years ago. If you're required to support a ten-year-old, EOL-ed platform because people don't upgrade, that's still not the JVM's fault...

If it were for rational people, we wouldn't have spring beans application around. World isn't built on technical excellence.

Java UI is sluggish and looks strange unlike OS native UIs.