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by beepbooptheory 25 days ago
I taught myself linux/coding/servers because there was a long period of time where all I had was a chromebook for school, but I still wanted to explore this thing called "pure data" that i'd heard about, and thought I could make art with it. I distinctly remember being continually amazed at how you could get so many things for free, if you know where to look. And yeah.. once I found emacs it was all over. To this day I am definitely going to always go "the hard way" where I can instead of pay any SaaS even $5 a month. In my head its like: "I am a mechanic, or at least, I can get by as one, why would I take my car to the shop and pay money??"

I know its not rational, but it would be pretty darn terrible in my brain to pay for an IDE. Even more unimaginable to me to pay $100 a month for something...

All to say, "cheapskate"-ness from TFA really resonated with me, I don't see the sentiment around a lot.
2 comments
chroma_zone 25 days ago
Yep. If it weren't for cheap / freely available tools (and their limitations) I wouldn't be where I am today. I think about this every time I make a tool of my own.
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ChiperSoft 24 days ago
Likewise. I avoided programming for years when I was young because the only way to get into it was to spend money on development suites like Borlund or Visual Studio. As a poor kid growing up in rural Michigan, that wasn't gonna happen.

The internet changed all that, because every net connected platform was built on platforms that cost nothing to learn or work in. I wrote my first HTML in freaking MS-DOS Edit. I learned JavaScript by copying code from View Source into an unregistered copy of BBEdit.

Do I have dev software I pay for? Of course! But not many (even fewer today than before everything switched to subscription pricing), and every one can be replaced with something that costs nothing.

The top thread on this post is people discrediting the author because they only used cheaper/free models, as if we should just accept and embrace the commoditization and enshitification of software development, even while it actively deskills us and creates codebases that cannot be maintained without the services that built them.

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