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Comment by nilved | Hacker News Reader

> If you can come up with an economic model which will support developers doing the hard work of producing something with a well-thought-out user experience, feel free to suggest it. Do you know of any besides targeted advertising or corporate sponsorship?

Don't be lazy. There are many many many many many projects that thrive with _zero_ cash flow, of which many are found in ChromeOS already. There is no reason for there to be a single drop of proprietary software on a laptop besides the user opting for it.

I'm going to hijack this comment to add that your opinion that money is the only reason to develop software is one of the worst things to ever happen to computing. If creativity and desire to help the world isn't enough for you, pass the torch to somebody else, because they will do a better job.

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Amen Brother.

I imagine a world where closed source software is looked down on in disgrace as unsafe and nonsensical. Soon we're going to see more and more successful closed source software companies switch to an open source model. One day hopefully people will have the knowledge to realize we can code everything our selves. 90% of our goods and services can be augmented or automated. We could and should have 3 hour work days and we should be retiring after 4-5 years.

In a world where we all had 3-hour workdays or some sort of guaranteed minimum income, my argument that "significant software projects require some sort of revenue stream in order to pay developers" becomes invalid. We don't yet live in that world.

> your opinion that money is the only reason to develop software

I don't hold that opinion. I hold the opinion that money is the only way to make developing software a full-time endeavor. Otherwise, I'd have to find some other way to support myself. As it stands now, I can cake my living writing proprietary software and try to use the time I have left over to write free software. But I also have to go grocery shopping, spend time with my wife, help my family out with things, maintain relationships with friends, understand and contribute to policy discussions in my community, exercise, sleep, cook, eat, and many other things besides software that contribute to a healthy life. Without being paid to write software, I would spend as much time on it as I spend playing the Irish drum...which happens to have been 0 for the past month. I'm sad about this. As I'm sad that I can't spend all day working on OpenHatch. You seem to be asserting that creativity and desire are enough for someone to engage in significant amounts of labor, however enjoyable. I ask you: How do you pay your monthly expenses? How do you think most developers of software, libre, gratis, or otherwise do so?

I'm writing this while running Chome in an Xmonad window on top of Ubuntu GNU/Linux. I'm not ignorant of Free Software.

What text editors would you recommend for beginners?

I don't think that's related to the substance of my comment (so you should consider this independent) but Light Table and Atom are probably the most beginner-friendly. vim is actually very easy to learn if you don't need to unlearn Emacs-style editing as well.

It is strange that you think it is unrelated to the substance of your comment. That indicates we are slightly talking past each other, because "What text editor should a beginner use?" is central to my comment. I'll outline how, since I seem to have been insufficiently clear.

Jck argued against the use of a particular text editor on the grounds that it was proprietary. I defended the use of of a proprietary editor in general on the grounds that: 1) It is important that the editor a beginner uses be well-designed. 2) Good design comes only from skilled people spending significant amounts of time on something. 3) In order for a person to spend significant amounts of time on something, they need to have something paying their monthly expenses. That could be a company's salary, student stipend, family, or kickstarter. 4) The most reliable way that I can see to get the money for a project like a text editor to support the monthly expenses of its core developers is by charging for the license to use the software.

If there is a more well-designed-for-a-beginner editor that is not proprietary, then my point #4 is false or irrelevant because some project has figured out a way to support development without blockading users from the source code.

For absolute beginners, they should start on codecademy or something.

When really starting with coding, you want something with autocompletion and easy library access for lookups. For Python I think Ninja-IDE is really good, it covers all the ground necessary, is cross platform, and has the python docs built in. Something IDLE or any terminal based editor won't have.

For general purpose editors, Geany / Gedit, and Kate / Kwrite give you all the tools you need to build software in a multi-application environment once you graduate from the first stages. Having used both, I still vastly prefer Kate to Sublime for how easy it is to theme languages how I want, the vim keybinds, the huge number of plugins that include things like git diffs and documentation lookup built in, etc.

And then you can graduate to full IDEs when you want to just "do work", like Monodevelop, Eclipse, Netbeans, IntellaJ, Kdevelop, Qt Creator....

On Linux, Geany is the best editor for beginners and experts who like things simple:

    sudo apt-get install geany geany-plugins

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