sure, but would we even be here talking about VS Code if it had been written in those languages? Would the extension community have grown as quickly? Would Microsoft have continued investment in the product if it hadn't?
I'm not saying that it wouldn't have been as successful, but we're here, now, and it is. It's a great product regardless of the fact that it's written with HTML/CSS/JS.
I like VS Code and Atom, so please understand my criticism here doesn't come out of hate or disdain.
Vim has a pretty huge community of plugins, and with NeoVim that plugin development has greatly accelerated. Intero, Fireplace, Vim FSharp (which works on regular Vim as well), and NeoComplete are excellent, and make NeoVim competitive with a lot of IDEs in my mind.
Part of the reason I don't use VS Code is that I really don't feel the need to run an instance of Chrome just to edit text. On my Mac, after loading a relatively large FSharp file, with FSAutocomplete (which is not known to be particularly efficient software), in NeoVim, it's taking so little CPU on the NVim side that it doesn't even register in Activity Monitor or `ps`. The same file loaded in latest version of VS Code (downloaded about thirty minutes ago) with the Ionide plugin is taking about 8% of the total CPU power.
With computers as powerful and wonderful as they are nowadays, I think you could make a solid argument of "Who the hell cares?", but in my mind, we have been editing text with full screen editors since the 80s, and had interactive IDEs since the 90s. If we could do this efficiently since the 90's, why should we opt for an inefficient solution now, especially if the efficient solutions are competitive?
Again, I'm saying this out of love. I use VS Code or Atom occasionally when I want to edit Markdown or HTML, and I think they are solid editors, especially considering that they are free. I understand that they are there to more to offer an open source and competitive solution to something like Sublime Text, and not to win-over the command-line-editor crowd, and at that I think they succeed. I just wish that an efficient framework like Qt, which has JS support, had caught on instead, since I think it would be a lot more efficient.
It's just a guess, but I think the main reason to run VSC in a browser is that they can later also let in run in a browser, without install. You will develop, store, and run your code on Azure, without any local installation.
(I don't know if that is a great vision, but it is a good rationale to use Web tech for IDE development)
I know this is like a "you can get something as good as Dropbox by just running an FTP server" thing that you see on HN occasionally, but if I wanted that, I conceivably could just run a VM on Azure/AWS/Digital Ocean and SSH in for development with NeoVim. I guess the interface wouldn't be as streamlined though.
>sure, but would we even be here talking about VS Code if it had been written in those languages? Would the extension community have grown as quickly?
Why not? Didn't hurt ST or TextMate much (though them being closed source did). And we still use Vim, written in C, 40+ years on, and it has tons of plugins...
>Would Microsoft have continued investment in the product if it hadn't?
MS developed Monaco for over a decade, with very little adoption, so why not?
I'm not saying that it wouldn't have been as successful, but we're here, now, and it is. It's a great product regardless of the fact that it's written with HTML/CSS/JS.