> the price is prohibitive
150$ for a tool you use everyday for your job? Go ask a carpenter how much they spend on their tools, and they make a fraction of what a software developer makes.
150$ for a tool you use everyday for your job? Go ask a carpenter how much they spend on their tools, and they make a fraction of what a software developer makes.
For reference, I've used Sublime Text for many, many years and was only able to justify the 79$ (now 99$) purchase price when ST4 came out last year, after a few months of unusually low expenses at home. I would 100% not be able to casually afford it now, in a normal month, even for a tool I use daily.
And I'm not some kind of out-of-school trainee, I've been working as a dev for the past 9 years and I'm now doing devops in a somewhat well paying company.
I am not from Italy, so I can't say how much carpenters in Italy spend on their tools, but I know that when we had a carpenter work on our house in Austria, they showed up with a lot more than $150 worth of tools. Just the Hilti drill they had has a list price north of 2000€. $150 might just get you the drill serviced.
They might even pay more for software than the average programmer -- typical CAD software used for construction plans often costs 1000€ or more per seat.
Also, when comparing the salary to the cost of tools you have to consider that the salary is what's left after expenses (such as tools) have been accounted for.
It’s a small sum of money for me. It is obviously not a small sum of money for a Bangladeshi beggar or a Peruvian cobbler.
What, exactly, is the point of this complaint? It’s obvious that people are speaking about themselves. Some people in some nations have more money than other people in other nations — that’s the world we live in. We are all already aware of this.
What is useful about bringing this up? Should every discussion of every price of everything in the world have to list how affordable it is in each and every country on earth? Is that your idea of a realistic approach to a discussion?
The parent just explained why in Italy this would not be a small sum of money, and you’re now equating them with a beggar.
The whole point we’re trying to make is that it’s not “Bangladeshi beggars” that cannot afford this, but a large group of the intended target audience.
That can be a fair trade-off they make, but you seem to brush it off as “if you can’t afford $150 for a tool like this, obviously you’re a beggar and definitely not a software dev”, which shows a completely out of touch perspective on salaries, cost of living, exchange rate, etc of a huge portion of the modernized, western world.
I’d suggest you learn to read things charitably, instead of searching for the most unlikely and preposterous meaning you can possibly dream up in order to get mad at a post. You’ll be happier for it.
If you’re self employed and use it as a business expense it’s more reasonable an expense.