[ChiperSoft]

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.