It's a russian company with the most people (especially engineers) in St. Petersburg. It's only technically registered in Prague. They have only 50 people there. And around a thousand people distributed across Russia (St. Petersburg, Moscow, Novosibirsk), Munich, Boston and brand new office in Amsterdam.
But there is no way I'll let all of those issues start affecting me with an anti-American attitude, and all the same I won't be having an anti-Russian or anti-Chinese attitude. First, I don't have anything to gain. I think China is making the best price/value phones out there at the moment, Russia has JetBrains and some good tools like Yandex for Domains which is free, and the US, well Google/Android/Apple you name it.
In a way it is like the console wars. Instead of going with Nintendo against Sega, just get both consoles and be happy.
Russia and China's citizens are not demons or angels, their moral character, I'm sure, is comparable to anywhere else. But... the governments of those countries wield absolute power over those people. The moral character of the people is irrelevant.
I'd also encourage you to consider separating your concerns about the Russian government and individuals living in Russia, just as you might other governments and their citizenry.
Good points
> I'd also encourage you to consider separating your concerns about the Russian government and individuals living in Russia, just as you might other governments and their citizenry.
I do separate them, in a moral sense. But in a practical sense, Russian companies can't really be separated from their authoritarian government. What can they do to resist? There are no checks and balances. To be fair, Jetbrains was probably even around before Russia even started to settle definitively into its current authoritarian predicament. But thanks to the Putin regime, how on earth can they be trusted?
Telemetry features (on by default) can/could be used to obfuscate nefarious network chatter.
That's a big ask, because the Russian government's relationship with its citizenry is very different from the relationship of a free country's government with its citizens. Namely, I am confident that there is substantially zero risk that my country might compel me through extra-legal channels to modify my work product to target a foreign adversary. If they did, I would have many avenues to resist them, including the courts and the free press. But we know that this is not the case in Russia, being that they have neither rule of law nor a truly independent media. And we know that the head of that country is at best a violent and evil man, and so is an entity to be feared by those whose interests are misaligned with his.
So, as much as we might want to, it's not quite possible to separate the risks imposed by the Russian government from individual Russian people.
I’m not quite sure which country you were talking about?
While I agree with your general point, it just occurred to me that that could be applied to both leaders. It’s the country and the structure of that country that is different (e.g. leaders will change, vs not).
But he already expressed intention to get Greenland, no?
Yet something tells me that if, say, Mr. Obama did present Point Roberts ( https://www.google.ca/maps/place/Point+Roberts,+WA+98281,+US... ) to Canada (as Khrouschev did with Crimea) then nothing would stop Mr. Trump to take it back.
Whataboutism. And, yeah, that was super bad. So, for that matter, was the whole colonial era. But none of those guys are still the leaders of nuclear-capable nation states, so they're a little less relevant than Putin to our prospects going forward.
> are not proven beyond reasonable doubt.
This is not a court of law. My standard for "observing events as likely true on internet comment threads" falls somewhere below "beyond a shadow of a reasonable doubt" and somewhere above "preponderance of evidence." But I'd say for these cases we're way closer to the former than the latter.
> Wikipedia link.
On the other hand, Russian nationalists and apologists of Russian politics are sometimes criticised for using allegations of "Russophobia" as a form of propaganda to counter criticism of Russia.[14][15]
The argument here is that USA cannot claim moral high ground when USA is actively committing the same act. Blindly claiming whataboutism without even attempting to refute this argument and is, therefore, a form of intellectual dishonesty.
> This is not a court of law, so that's kind of irrelevant.
It is important to make reasonable arguments in defense of your claims even outside courts of law.
> On the other hand, Russian nationalists and apologists of Russian politics are sometimes criticised for using allegations of "Russophobia" as a form of propaganda to counter criticism of Russia.
This is neither here nor there. This whole argument is inconclusive.
I guess I just don't consider an annexation from the 1840s to be "active" the same way I think of one from the 2010s.
> Reasonable arguments outside court
Sure. And I think most reasonable external observers agree that Putin has likely ordered the assassination of at least several of his critics.
I assume therefore, that you must not be Australian [1]
[1] https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2018/12/new_australia...?
There are a LOT of great engineers in places other than SV, Austin, Boston, etc.
You're skipping over several commercial Java IDEs available when IntelliJ first came out: Most notably, Borland JBuilder, which was an excellent product. Symantec had Visual Cafe as well, which was not really in the same league as JBuilder, but still had some magic.
IMHO, JetBrains succeeded by having a product as good as JBuilder (and revving it so it got better quickly) and not cratering as a company the way Borland did.
I liked JBuilder, but VisualCafe was a nightmare. But IntelliJ was much more responsive and much cheaper.
I switched from JBuilder to IntelliJ in 2002 I think.
JBuilder was good but on oh so expensive, if you wanted the full-featured version! IIRC it was 5 or 10 times the price of IntelliJ.
What blew me away when I tried IntelliJ for the first time, in comparison to JBuilder, was the refactoring tools. For the first time I felt I could safely rename classes and methods and move classes without manually searching my codebase.
Before that, for doing vanilla maven + Java projects Eclipse was awesome and generally running circles around intellij in terms of performance, which is still something that is off by order of magnitudes in Intellij and something I miss a lot.
Intellij users are always surprised when I bring that up and say it is fine on their machine. And then I point out that 5-20 seconds to run a unit test after a 1 letter code change is obscenely slow compared to Eclipse because it finishes incremental compilation a few ms after you lift your finger and is ready to run your test. Intellij attempted to integrate the Eclipse incremental compiler but it is not used by default and generally not that well integrated. Their compilation strategy depends on a lot of caching, which is hard and frequently gets in an inconsistent state (i.e. your IDE lies to you about things compiling or not compiling), which is why people routinely rebuild their whole project, or worse invalidate caches and restart (a top level menu option because it needs to be).
I just can't live without a core thing like this missing, and compounded with a number of other things that Eclipse does better, I stay on Eclipse. Unfortunately many younger developers think IntelliJ is all there is.
Given that performance is a recurring topic in the Intellij release notes I conclude that they know they still have issues there and they are slowly looking for ways to make things faster. This is not a solved problem.
Part of this is the Kotlin compiler; part of this is indexing; part of this is simply caching logic.
I recently worked on the Elasticsearch code base in intellij. Fast is not a word I would use to describe that. It's a big code base and it clearly was struggling with it. I know some Elastic developers that still use Eclipse basically for this reason.
I almost never close a project and I never open a project. It's just all there. If I need to use or modify a piece of code, written by me or someone else, it's all accessible to me at all times with a single keystroke.
No project switching. Close to no context switching. IntelliJ doesn't even come close to this kind of power.
When I use IntelliJ I feel like I'm using a nice tool with a lot of sweet superficial features but lacking the comprehensiveness and the underlying grunt of Eclipse. It's like driving a Maserati (IntelliJ) vs a SUV (Eclipse). Yeah, I can drive around town pretty quick in a Maserati but for getting real heavy duty work done, it's an SUV every time.
Try creating an empty project in IntelliJ and then add each of your Eclipse projects as a module to the IntelliJ empty project.
Doesn't mean IntelliJ is bad, it's just a bit limited in that regard.
My dozens of projects are not a single project with "modules". I have a universe of code in multitudes of interrelated projects, closed source and open source. I want to refactor openly, not having to care how I'm moving code between projects. Eclipse works perfectly for this. IntelliJ does not.
Import each one individually as a new module in a root project, and everything will be hunky dory.
A "module" in this case is just an atomic closure of some sort.
I've got plenty of Intellij projects with >50 modules, each of which are their own git repository, just fine.
There are no islands. There's now switching between anything. It's just all my code and dependencies, always open and accessible and instantly available.
Creating a new project in Eclipse then requires no importing of modules on my part, I just create a new project, it's in my workspace and voila—it's now an integral part of my universe of code.
This does not match my experience at all, fwiw. I keep all manner of projects open simultaneously.
I guess that pushed them to improve ;)
As I said in a parent, I'm very certain the competition from IntelliJ got them off their asses :).
Eclipse workspace = IntelliJ project
Their products are/were ambitious in an MVP environment.
Conditional build steps have been requested by users for years and even though it's the most requested feature, nothing has happened for years.
But it's still way way ahead of the alternatives.
Like Jenkins, Bamboo, TFS, VSTeam, TravisCI, CircleCI, GitLabCI, UrbanCode?
Maybe it's just me, but the CI/CD space is pretty crowded these days, and Jenkins is still #1 for a reason. I don't find myself fighting TeamCity as much these days but there's alot if things I wish it could do better.
Putting together a pipeline in Azure DevOps with tons of YAML is not a great experience.
As far as Jenkins is concerned I think that it's biggest selling point is that it's free.
Still, I wonder if they could have been successful without funding if they were a US or Western European company. Especially in the early days, I'm sure the much lower salaries in Prague allowed them to be more competitive with a lower burn rate. My point is I think their VC-less success would have been much more difficult in a place with higher salaries and cost-of-living.