I think most arguments have already been made. I’m currently using intellij community edition. It’s fine for java/kotlin development. I switched some years ago because IBM made a mess of eclipse and made it increasingly harder for me to do java development in it. The kotlin plugin is not very actively maintained and not in a usable enough state that I can open my gradle projects in eclipse and have a workable setup (i.e. stuff actually building).
The problem with the community edition is that it does not do kotlin native. IMHO Kotlin native is where the action is going to be in the near future. Except, if the only way to do it is by buying CLION, it’s not going to be an attractive move for a lot of people currently not using IDEA products that have plenty of other options for doing native development as well.
If CLION is the only way to get a decent developer experience for kotlin native, it’s going to have a hard time competing with languages that have more options
The fix is obvious and could benefit actually IDEA as well.
- IDEA currently does not do anything with the language servers for different languages used in VS code and many other languages. Supporting that is probably a nice idea and could get them support for all sorts of stuff that people currently choose vs code for. Lets face, it all the JS kids are mostly ignoring Idea currently and there are a lot of nice new languages out there; most of which have some level of language server support. Wouldn’t it be nice if all of those worked in IDEA as well?
- Kotlin as a mainstream full stack language cannot be an IDEA walled garden (as many argue above). Some minimal language server support is already available on github but not very actively maintained. Idea could put some effort on improving this and get some cheap success. Think of it as a gateway drug. It will allow people to start fiddling with kotlin code in vs code and then get an IDEA license when they figure out all those cool refactorings and other goodies are worth having. This is also great in projects where e.g. frontend developers are not necessarily very eager to fire up Intellij.