I am happy JetBrains became a full-blown real software company (where I count only companies with their own programming language) instead of aping Atlassian (their main competitor), and Kotlin has some interesting ideas. They are closest to Borland we have these days; independent small company with quality development tools. Though the code completion quality dropped so much lately (e.g. in PyCharm it became completely useless) that I am now actively trying to find replacements.

I wouldnt go as far as comparing them to borland

Remember that the community edition is open source

They are an open company and do offer a lot completly for free

Borland was .. a very traditional closed company

>> Borland was .. a very traditional closed company

One of the great things about Borland was they published the source code to their VCL (their main platform library Delphi and C++ builder applications used). So you could read, learn from, troubleshoot and debug with the source code. At a time when Microsoft and most companies didn't.

And the VCL design patterns were/are incredibly elegant, and studying them an excellent and accessible way for an interested programmer to learn some real software architecture skills.

>(e.g. in PyCharm it became completely useless)

Very weird; what happened ? In java/kotlin it is as great as ever in Android Studio

No idea; I do extensive tensorflow/keras/opencv/numpy/openai stuff and code completion there is a joke, I just get completely unusable hints. Maybe I am A/B tested by them or something, but I am forced to have browser with documentation/stack overflow opened these days. And IntelliJ used to be much better for me at around IDEA 12, since then code completion doesn't predict my typical choices at top places, I need to scroll down more and more. So that one is individual style-based. I also long for the days of simplicity as I refuse to keep huge amount of "how to do a certain thing in certain IDE" in my head; IDE should help me with the complexity of language and not impose another time sink on me.

Code completion has always been hit-or-miss in dynamic languages like python. Is it possible that something in your libraries (or maybe something in your programming style) changed such that the IDE can no longer make good guesses?

FWIW I've never found IntelliJ code completion in Javascript, Ruby, or Python to be very accurate. It's fantastic in Java and Typescript.

It's also fantastic for JavaScript in VSCode, thanks to VSCode automatically downloading type definitions.

I think you misunderstood something. You should use Gradle for standalone builds. You definitely don't have to use Idea.

> and their response, on their forum, was that they are intentionally make hard to avoid the jetbrains ide while using kotlin

do you have a link for this?

It's good you supplied the link, as you've misrepresented its contents somewhat. What they are discouraging downloads of is the standalone compiler, because if you want to compile outside of an IDE, gradle is the better choice.

As alternatives they suggest their online REPL (to play and learn without installing anything), IntelliJ (unsurprisingly their favourite), gradle, or maven. The latter are about as fully-fledged build systems as you can imagine and are easily used with any editor.

I'm sure there will be gradle plug-ins available for VS.Code or Atom, or a gradle mode for emacs.