I used Emacs for 15 years. I've been off of Emacs for about 5-6 years now and I won't ever go back.
Here's why:
1. Refactoring. The refactorings in IntelliJ are amazing. Amazing. The ability to say (yeah, this class is now called Foo instead of Bar) and have everything automatically changed is outstanding. This is a basic example of course but you can also do things like remove a function parameter, and also do things like lookup reverse symbols.
2. Stable. IntelliJ is just amazingly stable. Part of this is that I had to write elisp to get Emacs to do stuff that IntellJ just already provides for me. Everytime Emacs would upgrade I would have to upgrade Emacs.
3. Pair programming. I could NEVER work with other engineers on their code and vice versa. We just didn't speak the same language.
Now mind you I also created a lot of the code you use in Emacs. I co-created EDE for example.
Java is more like assembly language programming at this point in software history.
You shouldn't be editing Java with any editor, let alone emacs.
This is because if you are using 3 frameworks, and 30 classes with DI and reflection, just to post a json to a http end point, you should be using an IDE to handle that kind of madness.
That's more of an architecture problem rather than an intrinsic characteristic of Java though. I'm not a fan of the language, but I think the latest versions added some nifty features that make working with the language not as bad as it used to be.
Here's why:
1. Refactoring. The refactorings in IntelliJ are amazing. Amazing. The ability to say (yeah, this class is now called Foo instead of Bar) and have everything automatically changed is outstanding. This is a basic example of course but you can also do things like remove a function parameter, and also do things like lookup reverse symbols.
2. Stable. IntelliJ is just amazingly stable. Part of this is that I had to write elisp to get Emacs to do stuff that IntellJ just already provides for me. Everytime Emacs would upgrade I would have to upgrade Emacs.
3. Pair programming. I could NEVER work with other engineers on their code and vice versa. We just didn't speak the same language.
Now mind you I also created a lot of the code you use in Emacs. I co-created EDE for example.