> If you're referring to Visual Studio then I think you and I have very different definitions of "good".
Go to 2010 Linux and find me an IDE with:
1. A functioning graphical debugger that works across multiple languages, both native and JITed
2. A fully featured WYSIWYG UI editor that can generate backing code in multiple languages
3. Comes with a SQL engine setup and ready to use for development, that it can seamlessly connect to for testing out code locally[1]
4. Can step from your code into SQL statements and back again
5. Can step from code you are debugging on a remote box, to SQL code running on yet another machine, and back again
6. Has functional, production ready, data binding that works with arbitrary data sources, that also fully integrates with the GUI builder
7. Integrates with source control
8. Integrates with task/work item management
9. Enables the workflow of you get an email about a fault on a server in a test environment, you click a link, and the IDE connects to the remote machine, downloads symbols, and starts up in the debugger
10. Automatically fetches the proper debugging symbols for the version of code you are debugging
And again, this was all doable across a multitude of languages.
IIRC Eclipse was the nearest "competitor" and it was slower than molasses and didn't have anything near the same feature set.
Visual Studio is an impressive piece of software. Has it had some buggy releases? Yeah. Does it feel super outdated now? Yes it does, in comparison, VS Code's ability to navigate around files/projects is incredible.
But I had a better developer experience using Visual Studio and C# a dozen years ago (!!!) than I have with Node JS now.
[1] The modern cloud version of this is such a disaster.
Having lots of features != being of high quality. If Eclipse was "slower than molasses", then VS was a brick - as many a poor computer of mine from back then can attest, fans a-spinning at speeds that made hurricanes feel like gentle breezes all because I'd double-click on some random file that VS decided "hey I can open this therefore I should be the default" (and thanks to all that feeping creaturism, that was a lot of files).
Meanwhile, Emacs worked fine. Netbeans worked fine. Eclipse worked okay. Qt Creator existed (though I can't attest to how well it worked then). There were definitely options, and while sure, they lacked a lot of those fancy bells and whistles, at the end of the day were those really worth turning computers into passenger jets?
> But I had a better developer experience using Visual Studio and C# a dozen years ago (!!!) than I have with Node JS now.
That bar is so low that even ants have to duck to get under it.
This may be obvious to you, and I am trying not to put words in your mouth.
Linux and UNIX doesn't build tooling this way, because they believe that you make one tool to do one thing well, and these things you mention while related are not one thing. You'd use the OS as an IDE in this context.
The mindset is changing over time, systemd, vscode, etc.
If you're referring to Visual Studio then I think you and I have very different definitions of "good".