[sriram_malhar]

Musicians and carpenters make far less than programmers, but they still buy their tools. Software people are too entitled. Even if you are not professional, you can still afford 54c a day ($200 a year). Even a programmer in India can.

[5e92cb50239222b]

Many junior developers in my city make around $300 a month. After spending $200 on rent and most of the rest on food, you're not left with much. I understand nobody really cares about crap-holes like mine when they're making most of their money in Western Europe and North America, so just throwing it out there.

[pjmlp]

As highschool student in 80's Portugal, 10 years after 40 years dictatorship and colonial war were behind us, when software was sold as bootleg copies on bazaars, I saved enough money to eventually buy Turbo Pascal for students at 30 000 escudos.

As I wanted the real deal and not a bunch of no name floppies with copied manuals.

That would be around 150 euros, without taking into account the inflation to modern days.

And to place the price in perspective, it was a third of the minimum wage, while the overall cost of my PC took 5 years for my parents to pay back to the bank.

[cosmodisk]

Fair enough, but what's the revenue per dev in your org then? Surely it's a bit more than $300/months.

[smeagull]

I'm not paying that much for an editor that runs counter to my muscle memory, just so I can use a different programming language.

If a language requires some IDE to make it usable, then I put it in the same camp as Java: Hope the competition are using it.

[pjmlp]

No wonder FOSS languages are stuck in the pre-historic tooling.

[xigoi]

If “pre-historic” means “doesn't take several minutes to start and require 8GB of RAM”, I guess that's a good thing.

[pjmlp]

I wonder how Turbo Pascal IDE managed to fit into 640 KB....

[xigoi]

Because it wasn't based on bloatware liks Electron. And I guess the developers actually cared about performance because at that time they couldn't just assume that everyone has a powerful machine.

[pjmlp]

Electron !== IDE.

[the_gipsy]

"IDE as tool for everything" is what's prehistoric, at this point.

[pjmlp]

Sure, some people enjoy being stuck with workflows born out of phosphor terminals.

[the_gipsy]

So why don't you program in VR then? Why not generate CI jobs from an ML model?

[pjmlp]

Graphical IDEs are good enough.

Xerox PARC already showed how.

[xigoi]

Do you have any other workflow that allows so much programmability and composability while being lightweight and cross-platform?

[pjmlp]

You mean the "cross platform" as long it is UNIX?

[fomine3]

That's why I buy JetBrains all products pack. It supports many languages.

[KronisLV]

I'm tempted to ask what languages you're using and what has your best experience with them been like.

Because as messy as Java is, refactoring codebases in it that have been kept alive for close to a decade is surprisingly not madness-inducing (most of the time), at least in some of the sane frameworks. Apart from, you know, legacy projects basically killing your career in the long term.

I'm not sure what other language I'd feel comfortable with changing how some method works across 50 other places that call it and have the IDE do most of the heavy lifting.

Yes, I have Stockholm syndrome, probably. Yes, I'd prefer to retire to planting potatoes in a farm, rather than work with NullPointerExceptions.

[sangnoir]

How much would a carpenter pay for a fancy bench top for their workshop? I'm guessing not a lot, since they can make one themselves.

Programmers are toolmakers, and are therefore harsh critics of tools they use; just like a carpenter will tell you everything that's wrong with the design, and choice of wood that went into a pricey, but ultimately-affordable-to-a-carpenter bench top. Having access to cheaper, good-enough alternatives is part of it.

[sriram_malhar]

A carpenter is not going to make his/her own table saw. A basic table saw costs $300ish.

I'm not writing my own IDE or my own database. I can, and I have, in times past. I do pay for tools that I need.

[sangnoir]

> A carpenter is not going to make his/her own table saw.

This is where the analogy breaks down, but they'd likely download a free one made by a consortium of other carpenters, which can be customized to their needs

> I do pay for tools that I need.

As have I: I was paying JetBrains yearly until they published plans to brick my IDE if I dared stopped sending them money. They walked this back after an uproar - but that episode showed me that I was also playing in their sandbox and subject to their every whim. I now default to using tools that can be forked at a moments notice (by myself or others)

Also, JetBrains IDEs were far ahead of the competition back then. For the tech stack and codebases I now work on (or perhaps additional experience?), none of the JetBrains IDEs are worth the effort. vim and a handful of plugins & scripts are adequate 95% of the times, VSCode takes me up to 98%, and it's diminishing returns beyond that

[makeitdouble]

This is an undue attack. We buy our computers and screens and keyboards, most of us are on commercial OS, we pay for SaaS at a non trivial price, and most of us also use additional personal apps that aren't free (including password managers, mail clients etc.). Those are actual tools for the trade.

Arguing we should also buy every Jetbrains product is like arguing carpenters should buy line drawing AR goggles. Perhaps some will see the value in it, but it's far from an noncontroversial POV. If you feel a tool as as much downsides than upsides in your workflow, you don't use it, whatever its price is.

[philliphaydon]

“I’ll pay $1000’s to get all setup and running with everything I need, including a bunch of stuff I don’t need, but not the last $90 for some productive software to make more money”

Yeah ok.

[lodovic]

Some people really like these tools, and that is OK. But not everyone has the same workflow. I personally get a JetBrains license from the project I work on - but I refuse to use it, as I find their tools pedantic, slow, and eating my computer's resources. Ymmv.

[philliphaydon]

Oh absolutely, if someone perfers emacs or vim, VS, VSCode, some JetBrains IDE. Punch cards.

Whatever makes them happy and productive, that's great. I've seen people use Vim and its crazy how productive some people are with it.

My point is complaining about the price of some software like it's blocking them from doing anything. They spend all this money on all this hardware and software, but when it comes to development, oh it costs too much I don't want to pay $90 for something to earn money...

[makeitdouble]

The initial [0] only mentioned the steep price in passing, and primarily lamented the inefficiency of the design. I'm not even sure from that phrasing that implying isn't a paying user, even if they seem to care about people who wouldn't fork the money for the editor.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31734755

[makeitdouble]

Is this a JetBrains commercial account ? Am I at fault for not liking their product that much, and thus not paying them their apparently deserved yearly subscription ?

This feels pretty weird to be faulted for using other companies' products. And no, switching to Jetbrains' doesn't make me more money. Could be the reverse from my past trials.

[philliphaydon]

It's not about liking or not liking a product. You're complaining about pay for a product. If you like a product and its helpful why are you against paying for it?

[makeitdouble]

> If you feel a tool as as much downsides than upsides in your workflow, you don't use it, whatever its price is.

↑ that was in my answer (with the typo, on the “as as” instead of “has as”, my bad)

You might be confounding mine with another comment. I recognize the talent and expertise of JetBrain’s staff, but don’t like their products in general, and use VSCode as a primary editor, and (paid) Textmate for the rest.

To your general point, looking at project like Bitwarden, with their initial kickstarter and their current revenue, I don’t feel like people are restraining from paying for useful software, even when it has a generous free tier.

[xigoi]

You forgot the additional $1000 for a computer powerful enough to run JetBrains.

[philliphaydon]

Sorry I meant to type $1000’s. Corrected it.

I ran JetBrains software on one of those 1.5ghz MacBook 12” and it was totally fine.

I don’t think it needs “powerful” hardware.

Not like visual studio. Now that’s a pain!

[KronisLV]

> I don’t think it needs “powerful” hardware.

That depends. If you have multiple large projects open at the same time, it'll eat a lot of RAM, even if it won't be too CPU intensive.

I run it on a ThinkPad that has 32 GB of RAM, when I have about 6-7 instances of the IDE open and all of these services running locally (generally Java projects, the largest of which is around 4000+ source files), then it gets close to the resource limits.

[philliphaydon]

My ThinkPad with 32GB of ram with 5+ instances of Rider, and DataGrip, VSCode, all open, switching between instances is quick. (checks number of source files for top 3 projects I work on daily) with 4684 files, 10230 files, 7211 files. (no npm junk)

Switching between Visual Studio is 15-20 seconds of wait time while it decides if any files have changed.

[philderbeast]

If you work for a company, in any field, and they don't supply the tools for you to do your job, they are doing them selves a disservice.

If you want your employees to be productive, you provide them tools to achieve that, otherwise you get what you pay for.

It's the Companies that are acting entitled in this situation, not the workers.

[einpoklum]

1. A Musician has one tool. Ok, maybe a note-stand etc. But in software, there are thousands of "tools" you can buy.

2. Physical tools vs making copies of some bytes. No need to retread this here, but bottom line: Not comparable.

[sriram_malhar]

No semi-successful professional musician is so bare. Software engineers are not your average starving type of people (unless they are willingly doing intermittent fasting!)

[dizhn]

I wonder if anybody has 'one' guitar. I don't really know anyone who does.

[sam0x17]

We pay $3500 every 2 years to have up-to-date hardware

[sam0x17]

And if we try to re-sell our equipment to try to recoup some of that cost, best you can get is like 1/4th the original price typically by the time it's time to sell