Comment by throwaway2037 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by throwaway2037 | Hacker News Reader

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I agree with the general sentiment of your post.

Regarding Java and C#, I am stunned by how good are IDEs now. To be clear, when I say IDE, I am specifically talking about a tool that enhances the edit-compile-debug cycle. Compared to 20 years ago when I wrote C, C++, and Perl, the IDEs were mostly terrible, except Visual Studio for Windows. The majority of my development cycle was all terminal-based: vim to edit, make to build (C/C++ only), gdb/perl -d to debug. Hoi, awful. (And, I still enjoy those all three languages!) As mega-corp computing slowly migrated to Java & C#, my productivity has increased dramatically. I guess at least 2x, if not more. Yes, some of this comes from how forgiving a modern VM can be (NullPointerExceptions, debugging, etc.), but a lot can ascribed to the incredible ecosystem of IDEs.

Regarding JavaScript, in the context of a modern web browser, high school students (in almost any country in the world) can easily Google a little bit, read some blogs, and then start GUI programming. And this doesn't require expensive, licensed software, like Delphi 30 years ago.

>And this doesn't require expensive, licensed software, like Delphi 30 years ago.

Delphi wasn't expensive for most of it's life, until they got greedy, and lost the market.

Lazarus is the modern open source replacement, it's mostly compatible with Delphi, and $1400 cheaper. ;-)

I programmed in Delphi for years and have done some toy things with Lazarus, so I'm painfully aware of the quality and reliability difference.

It is quite bizarre how us programmers, who make hundreds of thousands of dollars per year, are unwilling to pay $1,400 that will make us more productive.

I make $0/year, so my choices are more restricted.

How about the Delphi community edition? https://www.embarcadero.com/products/delphi/starter

You can use it for free util your revenue reaches $5,000.

Yeah, I've had it installed, more than once in the past few years, but I just can't bring myself to use it.

> It is quite bizarre how us programmers, who make hundreds of thousands of dollars per year, are unwilling to pay $1,400 that will make us more productive.

Not all of us. Here in Latvia that amount would be around a half of one's salary, quite likely more than that.

The further you move in the direction of poorer countries, the less the argument of "developers are expensive, everything else is cheap" actually holds.

I don't doubt that in some places a single decent AWS EC2 instance would be a developer's salary.

Lots of devs are willing to spend on tools but end up in workplaces where they're not allowed to install them, tools don't offer compatible licensing for that scenario, or where the workplace won't purchase a license for them in tandem with their personal copy.

Look at all the copies of IntelliJ (and derivatives) that are sold. I think people are willing when the price point is right and it can get into the workplace. I personally wouldn't spend $1400 unless I could make my life better from it somehow, and that would mean it making me significantly better at earning money.

How about, it is quite bizarre how people who employ programmers, who make billions of dollars per years, are unwilling to pay $1,400 that will make us more productive.

My first professional job was doing Delphi.

To prepare for that I got a copy of a version of Delphi for free on a magazine CD. Was still more productive than many tools now.

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