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Comment by anigbrowl | Hacker News Reader

I don't get all the posts saying it's sad that it didn't take off commercially. No obstacle prevents grateful programmers from enriching the creators of a useful tool, and expanding the audience of likely users increases the probability of that happening. It's a great looking product (that I had not been aware of when it was commercial) and deserves wide adoption.

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It's odd that we're so reluctant to spend money on quality tools that increase our productivity. It pains me to spend the $300 for my editor even though it has paid for itself dozens of times over. I think we're spoiled by open source(and shareware before that).

totally agree, after years of vscode/geany/eclipse/whatever I now pay full annual license for the jetbrains bundle, so that I can focus on coding better, much better.

I do keep my vim around though, for any command line related editing vim will be my first choice, otherwise it will be jetbrains GUI.

I really missed source-navigator which is outdated badly these days, sourcetrail seems the new alternative finally. source-insight was pretty good too but it has no linux version.

Obviously the server is under heavy load, the page is barely reachable and the download stuck at 74MB. Will test this later.

downloaded it, it seems only works for cmake or you have to have a json database, stop here for now. I would think it can analyse the code directly, as source-navigator did to me. the UI looks shiny, but as far as usability goes, this requirement of cmake/compile.json is one step backwards to me.

Yes, this is because everyone is used to getting quality (though usually the quality is very lopsided) software for free. Shareware was a different beast because you still had to pay for if you wanted to use it (initially shareware only asked you to pay for but still gave everything for free, but as developers realized quickly in the 80s, practically nobody bothered and even a small "nag screen" made a big difference while people who removed some features - aka crippleware - saw their sales to significantly multiply).

When you can get something like Notepad++ (or similar) for free, paying for Sublime (or similar) feels like a rip off, even if the latter may do one or two things better.

Also quality rarely gets into the equation: a program that does 28378482 features in a half-baked way for free is often seen superior than a paid program that does 1/1000th of that but what it does it does in a higher quality.

Most engineers have an easier time getting their company to pay for a 1000$ tool, than donate 1000$ to an open-source project, that's the long and short of it.

I agree. I think this is the sort of tool that is better off as an open platform on top of which others can build more specific pieces. In some sense, I think a lot of the advantages of programming languages being open apply here.

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