Programmers spend an inordinate amount of time thinking about languages and tools, but don't want to pay for better ones, even when they are extremely cheap, drastically increase their productivity and save many headaches. Every other week, there is a post on HN complaining about funding open source. One of the few languages offering halfway decent tooling support is bad because... it makes users more dependent on tools? This makes no sense. Same story for Wolfram. If you want nice things, pay for them.
It doesn't have anything to do with price. The point is that I've invested a lot of time knowing my IDE (vscode) very well. Switching IDEs on the basis of a language which I've never used is a huge leap. You could make that leap a lot easier by allowing me to use it somewhere I'm comfortable first.
As others have mentioned in this thread, you are absolutely allowed to write Kotlin in VSCode! There is a perfectly good VSCode extension [1] for it. You may not receive the same extensive support that IntelliJ IDEA provides, but as Kotlin developer who occasionally writes in VSCode, I find it's decently usable. Once you're familiar with the command line, you'll probably be more productive running Gradle commands than fiddling with buttons and UI widgets anyway.
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