you just have to try to understand the difference. the friction is zero in a proper repl, unlike breakpointing and evaling.

Kotlin and IntelliJ IDEA really are a joy to work with in my opinion, they're very much my primary tools at the moment. I'd never really been exposed to functional programming features until I got into Kotlin and now I'm learning Scheme of all things, it's been a bit of a gateway drug for me.

I remember doing this with emacs and C in the 90s

Nice. I definitely want to give emacs a solid try at some point.

i've used emacs for 20 years. i still spend 80% of my day in it ... and vscode is vastly superior for development.

The thing that bugs me about the IDEs is how slow they are. I'm super productive in them, but I really don't feel like they need to be so slow. I'm not even talking about the indexing which I get.

In fact they weren't always unresponsive, seems Jetbrain's products have regressed in the last year, but mostly Webstorm. I use WS on OSX and Win10, and on both I get all kinds of slowdowns - different projects too. Tried disabling features, plugins, different GC, increased heaps. I may have to fire up J. Mission control at this point.

IDEA and Clion on Win10 are mostly fine.

It would just be cool to have all of these features, but the frontend be a responsive CLI.

try vscode ;) ~ 5*10^6 java code base, i don't notice any slowness. it would be impossible to do this in emacs.