Our division of IDEs into Java and non-Java products might seem like a gross form of language favoritism, but in fact it reflects a long-standing reality. That is, Java IDEs -- a product segment in which there is intense competition -- are profoundly more advanced, feature for feature, than their non-Java counterparts. This division has historical roots in the tool vendors' deep exploitation of Java reflection (the ability of language objects to describe themselves). Java IDEs have long had the features that garnered praise for Visual Studio in its current release: IntelliSense, TDD support, and so on.
JetBrains' IntelliJ IDEA adds the ability to do on-the-fly analysis of data movement through the program, analysis of class dependencies, and extensive automated refactoring that can be applied to an entire codebase. It also allows for the ability to detect duplicate code, to navigate the entire UI via keystrokes, and so forth. In addition, it supports all the major scripting languages that run on the JVM. IntelliJ IDEA is the only paid product in a field of free or open source options, but it continues to earn followers due to its remarkably intuitive interface and groundbreaking features.
