[2sk21]

IDEs used to be extremely expensive back in the 1990s. IDEs such as Microsoft Visual Studio and IBM's Visual age for Java were quite expensive subscription as I recall. subsequently, open source IDEs like Eclipse and VisualStudio seem to have become the norm.

[abeyer]

Visual Studio has never been open source, though some of the underlying build tools and compilers are.

Visual Studio Code is a different thing... and claims to be open source, but by intent and approach really is closer to source available.

[qingcharles]

I used to pay a fortune for a full Visual Studio + full MSDN experience every year until I eventually earned a free ride.

Wild how much you can get for free now. Amazing free IDEs. Every LLM offers excellent free plans if you are on a zero budget.

$10/mo GitHub Copilot is an absurd deal that has to be a loss in terms of pure compute cost.

[aeonik]

Compilers and programming languages themselves used to be hideously expensive as well.