VSCode replace Sublime, Visual Studio(full) and IntelliJ IDEs for so many developers. It has all the features >90% of developers and it is faster than VS and IntelliJ IDEs
Of course it is comparable. They are not quite the same thing, sure, but for many people they are definitely comparable and more often than not, VSCode is the better option. It may not support some things, but the same can be said about the “full blown IDE”.
tngranados said "many people" and did not say anything at all about the "majority" of people.
Judging from the fact that many people choose VS Code over JetBrains IDEs, despite being aware of JetBrains existence as an option, seems to be prima facie evidence that it is in fact the better choice for those folks.
It offers about 5 to 10 percent of all functionality of an IDE like IDEA. Much like devs on emacs and vim, most devs on VS Code have literally no idea what an IDE offers [1].
The things that worked in VS Code's favor:
- free. "All software must be free as in beer" is still a prevailing thought in IT, and people are loathe to pay for anything, even if that anything is extremely useful and very difficult to realise and support. On top of that IDEA still has a reputation of being expensive
- reasonably fast
- plugin system is decent and much easier to get into than IDEA, to keep IDEA as an example
- LSP is an overmarketed hype, but it worked in VSCode's immense favor. While it only covers a tiny sliver of things needed for a fully featured IDE, it covers enough of the important features, and is easy enough to implement. This way even languages that never had anything decent beyond broken syntax highlights in emacs and vim now enjoy at the very least an autocomplete
