The biggest competitor to IntelliJ IDEA Ultimate is their own Community Edition; I don't think they're seriously afraid of VS Code in the JVM languages space (JS is another story obviously).

Visual Studio Code for Java is developed by Microsoft alongside Red-Hat, you should have a look.

are there any benefits using it compared to open source eclipse with plugins?

VS Code has far more sensible defaults than Eclipse, in my opinion. If you enjoy using Eclipse, then by all means continue.

I havent used Eclipse in like 8 years, but if it is as slow and clunky as it was before then for sure VSCode is better.

I remember trying both Netbeans and Eclipse. Both were nice but very slow. Nowadays I sometimes use programs based on eclipse (birt or xmind) and God they make me happy that I'm not doing java dec on Eclipse.

It's not slow anymore, it's mostly as heavyweight as it always was, what means it's a lightish application nowadays.

Clunky can mean several things, and I don't think Eclipse changed in any of them since early 00's. If you consider it an specialized IDE (that means you'll download a full one for each kind of development, prepackaged), and disposable (non-upgradable, you'll download the next version and delete the current one), Eclipse is quite ok for many kinds of development (even some you do with Java).

Depends on the workflow, it is more tailored to Web APIs and headless/CLI coding, as it doesn't support graphical tooling.

As a JetBrains customer of their full product suite for many years, I actually agree with this sentiment.

In fact, I think VSCode is one of the best things to ever happen to JetBrains. In particular, Live Share forced them to finally respond with their equivalent product Code With Me (several years too late, but at least it's here).

Without VSC, I don't think JetBrains would be responding nearly as well. It's baffling they consider themselves a full-feature IDE product while having an inferior alpha live share that was rushed through only in response to competition. It's been suggested for years.

Looking forward to when they finally catch up with Eclipse and Netbeans, and finally allow for mixed mode debugging with native code.

IntelliJ is so big and complex and needs to support lots of plugins, it's probably not much fun to work on it.

> IntelliJ. You are still THE standard in Java development

I figured Eclipse was the most popular, followed by IntelliJ, followed by NetBeans. Is this mistaken? (I couldn't find a definitive answer with a quick google.)

It's literally in the linked IntelliJ blog post:

IntelliJ: 72%

Eclipse: 13%

Netbeans: 3%

Who knows how realistic it is though... I personally enjoyed working with Eclipse. It simply suffers from a reputation problem because people developed monoliths with hundred thousands of lines in a single maven project in it...

These numbers are probably very much inflated, they are taken from JetBrains' own survey. One could put a similar survey on eclipse.org and claim that 72% percent of Java developers use Eclipse.

The only time I've ever used Eclipse was when it was mandated by my employer. That happened to me twice.

I didn't stay long at either place - for some reason both companies were horrible places to work.

I have noticed a lot of new grads come out of College knowing Eclipse (and only Eclipse). Which is probably why it persists - and I still have to deal with it when I have to help junior devs figure out what's wrong with their eclipse config. Occasionally I can get one to convert to IntelliJ - the rest won't try a new IDE and that's a pretty good indicator of what kind of engineer they're going to be :)

What if I tried both and find eclipse far more efficient, more to the point, and I have built muscle memory and feel intellij slows me down... Am I that 'kind of engineer'? The tool is fine and works. Especially the barebones 'just plain java please no fucking plugins I'll handle git in terminal and C/C++ in Vim THANKS'.

I understand the annoyance with not being able to fix one's setup and that's on them.

But it seems very strange to fixate on what other people use as tools... Especially when both propositions are on the same productivity level. It's not like your colleagues are coding java in vim (and even then if productive AF, why does it bother anyone?).

I'll clarify: I'm specifically talking about junior devs who are having a lot of trouble with their IDE, have no experience with anything else, and aren't willing to give any other options a shot. It shows a lack of curiosity and/or desire to explore new tools. Some of them don't even know how to do a build outside of Eclipse (worse, I've known some "senior" devs with the same problem).

I know one good senior dev who prefers Eclipse. I'm not sure why, but he doesn't seem to have any major issues with it, and he's good, so... ok.

Every enterprise I have worked at used IntelliJ.

The software world is driven by hype, not by objective quality. See Go, Git (vs Mercurial), every project put out then subsequently abandoned by $PUPPYKILLER_CO after being depended on.

Go's mediocrity is a feature, since it's supposed to allow larger teams to get more work done. That seems to have worked fairly well in practice. The authors hypothesized that a inexpressive language might actually be superior for the types of things that Google used to do in C++ (in terms of development time including onboarding and defect rate [especially with regards to concurrency]).

Git's implementation is stronger and more useful for larger projects than Mercurial's, even if the user interface is less logical.

It's not that the software world is driven by hype but that the software world is driven by what the giants do. Often, what Google does isn't right for a small project.

> Go's mediocrity is a feature, since it's supposed to allow larger teams to get more work done.

I get it. Most software is boring, doesn't break new ground, and Go is well suited for those kinds of projects.

But I'm becoming an old, cranky developer who wants to work on problems where Go's mediocrity is more hindrance than advantage.

Same was told of Java (blue collar language) and here we are 25 later where Go people consider Java a PhD level language, while the eco-system is trying to steer a battle cruise to learn new tricks that should have been part of Java 1.0.

Guess how Go will look like at 25?

> since it's supposed to allow larger teams to get more work done.

Keyword being "supposedly", because in practice, it's quite terrible compared to established solutions like Java and C#.

> Go's mediocrity is a feature

Removing complexity from the language just moves it onto the developer and end-user code, it doesn't eliminate it. Go's mediocrity is a ticking timebomb.