[tomjen3]

I disagree that developers don't like to pay for their tooling, I think the issue is that fewer people will be using the tools if they are not free and that means that languages that are bound up to expensive tools (e.g Delphi) are going to lose the network effects other languages gets. Thus even if the language itself is inferior, that will be made up for by the much larger number of people who can create libraries and tools and answer stackoverflow questions.

Note that there is a free IDE for all the languages Jetbrains makes IDEs for.