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Intellij Ultimate costs me £14 a month, with the plugins (which makes it equivalent to Phpstorm, PyCharm, Rubymine and Webstorm) thats less than I spend on coff

Intellij Ultimate costs me £14 a month, with the plugins (which makes it equivalent to Phpstorm, PyCharm, Rubymine and Webstorm) thats less than I spend on coffee in two weeks, it's insane value however you look at it. That said I still spend a chunk of time (maybe 30%) in vscode because for somethings I prefer it (it's git support with git lens is incredible) and for TypeScript it's comparable to Intellij with the advantage you can start it, do an edit and close before Intellij has finished re-indexing.

tym0 9y ago
I keep seeing people writing about these "cheap" intellij subscriptions but on the website it's 400 pounds a year.
- pjmlp 9y ago
  I really would like to see this utopian world where all other professions outside IT also get their tools for free.
  - noir_lord 9y ago
    My grandfather was a master carpenter, he had a saying I've always liked "If you use something for more than an hour a day buy the best you can afford". I've never minded paying for developer tools as long as I could afford them, lots of professionals spend a lot more than we do on tools/professional development.
    - khedoros1 9y ago
      How did he feel about perpetually renting them? Even if the tool is currently perfect, I don't trust that the company's future plans will align with my future needs; I expect that they'll diverge. edit: I stand corrected; didn't see the asterisk and the separate page specifying that an active subscription isn't necessary to continue using the current version of the software.
      - greenshackle2 9y ago
        If you bother looking at the page you'll know when you buy a yearly subscription (or 12 consecutive monthly) with Jet Brains you automatically get a perpetual license for the current version. You only need to keep paying if you want to keep getting updates. If you're happy with the current version no one is forcing you to keep paying or keep updating. I can't speak to all IDEs, but at least with IntelliJ you're not just renting it. They even give you a helpful info-graphic telling you how to minimize subscription cost if you just want to get a perpetual license for a particular version: https://sales.jetbrains.com/hc/article_attachments/203545445/Year_and_a_months.png https://sales.jetbrains.com/hc/article_attachments/203545445...
        khedoros1 9y ago
        I looked at the page, but didn't read the definition of "perpetual fallback license". Thank you for the clarification. It still seems bizarre that one standard case is that you pay for a subscription, presumably using version x, and then are pushed down to version x-1 if you didn't subscribe for at least a year under version x.
        greenshackle2 9y ago
        Thinking about it a bit more yeah, when you stop subscribing you might have to roll back 12 months of updates on your machine, which is pretty odd. Clearly they want to discourage you from doing it. At least bug fixes are included: "The license also includes all bugfix updates, more specifically in X.Y.Z version all Z releases are included." I can understand giving you the major version at the time you bought the subscription but it's a bit stingy to exclude minor version bumps (Y releases).
        innocenat 9y ago
        It's not minor version bump. JetBrains doesn't use semver. X.Y is typically a major release, with X being the year (e.g. 2017.2)
        9y ago
    - imtringued 9y ago
      Offtopic: I would also urge you if you want to solder not to buy a cheap soldering iron from radioshack, etc. If you don't have the money for a weller or hakko soldering station then at the very least buy a chinese temperature controlled hakko 936 clone. The difference between a crap iron and a decent temperature controlled iron is gigantic.
      - SwellJoe 9y ago
        I used to solder a bunch as a kid, using my dad's Weller gun (which was built like a tank and still worked last I heard, even though it was something like 40 years old). When I bought my own cheap soldering iron "pencil" as an adult for one project, I thought I'd forgotten how to solder. It seemed so hard to get good joints with the cheap iron. The Weller gun wasn't even temperature controlled but it worked. The cheapo pencil iron just didn't get hot enough fast enough to be useful. Then I bought a mid-range Weller station and things got super easy again. It's about ten years old now and still works fine. It's probably a worthwhile investment, even for rare use. I mean, it's only ~$100 to get a pretty good iron, vs. $20 for garbage.
        cr0sh 9y ago
        If I ever could get my lazy butt in gear, I want to make a video to prove that you can solder competently with a cheap and crappy soldering iron. I have a soldering iron that has to be the cheapest of the cheap, that I've had since 1991; I got it when I went to a local votech electronics school fresh from high school. It's something like a 35 watt pencil iron, and the tip is janky like nobody's business. You have to wait like 15 minutes for it to heat up. The tip is not in the greatest shape. But I can tin that puppy up and solder perfectly with it. Now, I'm not saying you could do SMT rework using it, but basic thru-hole is no problem at all. I've assembled tons of things with it over the years. I also have a couple of older temp controlled irons - and they are great tools as well; honestly, I prefer them over my old iron. But I know, at least for myself, that what iron I use doesn't make a difference in the project, but rather the skills I bring to the table. As the old saying goes, "a poor craftsman blames his tools"...
    - disordinary 9y ago
      Not to mention this whole society which expects everything for free has made it very hard for a small company to get into the market and innovate. If you think about how much money you can make from a professional tool and how much productivity it gains you then the price should be a no brainier.
    - H1Supreme 9y ago
      Except that your grandpa didn't have to pay a monthly subscription for his hammer. I really dislike the subscription model for tools.
- charriu 9y ago
  For a company, yes. Individual license is much cheaper, but the devs need to pay for it themselves.
  - noir_lord 9y ago
    Exactly this, work would pay for it but I didn't ask, I already had a personal subscription and I use it at least as much outside of work as I do at work.
- noir_lord 9y ago
  https://www.jetbrains.com/idea/buy/#edition=personal https://www.jetbrains.com/idea/buy/#edition=personal 119 for Intellij 199 for everything. I didn't need everything since Intellij with plugins is everything (for the stuff I do).
- pdpi 9y ago
  You're probably looking at the "Businesses and Organizations" pricing, where the org pays £499/yr per user. The personal ("Individual Customers") license is starts at £199, and decreases to £159 then £119 for subsequent years. There's a bunch of groups (e.g. Open Source projects) that qualify for free or heavily discounted licenses too.
  - mpd 9y ago
    And maybe importantly, you can use a personal license at work, on paid projects, etc. I've never been particularly bullish on Atom or Electron, but I think Jetbrains is going to be eating their lunch for awhile at least.
    - jbergens 9y ago
      You have to buy a personal license yourself, your organization cannot pay for it. I just don't want to pay for work tools, my employer should do that and then it is the higher price.
      - pdpi 9y ago
        That's fair. Personally, though I could get the business license and expense it, I choose to pay for it as a personal license because I use it personally as well, and I'd be happy to pay the individual license price either way.
- ajmurmann 9y ago
  I don't know where these numbers come from. I just looked it up and my subscription to all IDEs JetBrains had to offer is $149/year. Given how much time I spend in RubyMine and IntelliJ this is a great price. Even if I wouldn't every once in a while use AppCode and DataGrip as well. My only issue is lack of good Rust support.
kllrnohj 9y ago
IntelliJ ultimate doesn't include C++ support, though, which is an additional $100 to get the "all products" package. $250 for a fairly basic C++ IDE that insists you use Cmake is not exactly an "insane value" to me, but ymmv.
- humanrebar 9y ago
  C++ tooling is fairly abysmal. Partly because the language is so darn complex and full of warts. You basically need to implement most of a compiler to get meaningful IDE features. Point being, a higher price point for a C++ IDE makes a lot of sense.
  - conistonwater 9y ago
    C++ has libclang, which is "most of a compiler" and pretty good, so if you can plug libclang into your editor, which most editors like emacs can do, then it's pretty close to an IDE.
    - humanrebar 9y ago
      The reasoning I've heard why an IDE doesn't do that (as opposed to a beefed-up text editor) is that an IDE needs to continue parsing and analyzing even in the face of an error in your source code. Because, presumably, you still want features like "jump to the definition of FoobarClient" to work even if you've misspelled something in a header included indirectly by FoobarClient.h. Compilers generally stop after the first set of errors in the first compilation unit. IDE indexers want to keep going as much as possible.
  - kllrnohj 9y ago
    > a higher price point for a C++ IDE makes a lot of sense. Except Eclipse does C++ better than CLion and it's $250 cheaper. The only real advantage JetBrains has here is consistency with their other products, but then they ruined that by putting it in its own standalone product. So you can't have, say, a Python/Java/Kotlin project with a C++ extension library in a single IDE window, at least not if you're invested in JetBrains technology. Whereas that would work fine in vscode, Eclipse, Atom-IDE probably once it gets a C++ language server plugin which LLVM is working on, etc... Competition is good. IntelliJ is far from complete. That's really all I'm getting at. IntelliJ is not the pinacle, superior end-all-be-all IDE that some were saying here. It maybe is if you're in their primary supported set of languages. But it's not if you're at all on the fringes of what JetBrains supports (not that I'd necessarily call C++ a "fringe", either, but whatever)

tym0 9y ago

I keep seeing people writing about these "cheap" intellij subscriptions but on the website it's 400 pounds a year.

pjmlp 9y ago
I really would like to see this utopian world where all other professions outside IT also get their tools for free.
- noir_lord 9y ago
  My grandfather was a master carpenter, he had a saying I've always liked "If you use something for more than an hour a day buy the best you can afford". I've never minded paying for developer tools as long as I could afford them, lots of professionals spend a lot more than we do on tools/professional development.
  - khedoros1 9y ago
    How did he feel about perpetually renting them? Even if the tool is currently perfect, I don't trust that the company's future plans will align with my future needs; I expect that they'll diverge. edit: I stand corrected; didn't see the asterisk and the separate page specifying that an active subscription isn't necessary to continue using the current version of the software.
    - greenshackle2 9y ago
      If you bother looking at the page you'll know when you buy a yearly subscription (or 12 consecutive monthly) with Jet Brains you automatically get a perpetual license for the current version. You only need to keep paying if you want to keep getting updates. If you're happy with the current version no one is forcing you to keep paying or keep updating. I can't speak to all IDEs, but at least with IntelliJ you're not just renting it. They even give you a helpful info-graphic telling you how to minimize subscription cost if you just want to get a perpetual license for a particular version: https://sales.jetbrains.com/hc/article_attachments/203545445/Year_and_a_months.png https://sales.jetbrains.com/hc/article_attachments/203545445...
      - khedoros1 9y ago
        I looked at the page, but didn't read the definition of "perpetual fallback license". Thank you for the clarification. It still seems bizarre that one standard case is that you pay for a subscription, presumably using version x, and then are pushed down to version x-1 if you didn't subscribe for at least a year under version x.
        greenshackle2 9y ago
        Thinking about it a bit more yeah, when you stop subscribing you might have to roll back 12 months of updates on your machine, which is pretty odd. Clearly they want to discourage you from doing it. At least bug fixes are included: "The license also includes all bugfix updates, more specifically in X.Y.Z version all Z releases are included." I can understand giving you the major version at the time you bought the subscription but it's a bit stingy to exclude minor version bumps (Y releases).
        innocenat 9y ago
        It's not minor version bump. JetBrains doesn't use semver. X.Y is typically a major release, with X being the year (e.g. 2017.2)
      - 9y ago
  - imtringued 9y ago
    Offtopic: I would also urge you if you want to solder not to buy a cheap soldering iron from radioshack, etc. If you don't have the money for a weller or hakko soldering station then at the very least buy a chinese temperature controlled hakko 936 clone. The difference between a crap iron and a decent temperature controlled iron is gigantic.
    - SwellJoe 9y ago
      I used to solder a bunch as a kid, using my dad's Weller gun (which was built like a tank and still worked last I heard, even though it was something like 40 years old). When I bought my own cheap soldering iron "pencil" as an adult for one project, I thought I'd forgotten how to solder. It seemed so hard to get good joints with the cheap iron. The Weller gun wasn't even temperature controlled but it worked. The cheapo pencil iron just didn't get hot enough fast enough to be useful. Then I bought a mid-range Weller station and things got super easy again. It's about ten years old now and still works fine. It's probably a worthwhile investment, even for rare use. I mean, it's only ~$100 to get a pretty good iron, vs. $20 for garbage.
      - cr0sh 9y ago
        If I ever could get my lazy butt in gear, I want to make a video to prove that you can solder competently with a cheap and crappy soldering iron. I have a soldering iron that has to be the cheapest of the cheap, that I've had since 1991; I got it when I went to a local votech electronics school fresh from high school. It's something like a 35 watt pencil iron, and the tip is janky like nobody's business. You have to wait like 15 minutes for it to heat up. The tip is not in the greatest shape. But I can tin that puppy up and solder perfectly with it. Now, I'm not saying you could do SMT rework using it, but basic thru-hole is no problem at all. I've assembled tons of things with it over the years. I also have a couple of older temp controlled irons - and they are great tools as well; honestly, I prefer them over my old iron. But I know, at least for myself, that what iron I use doesn't make a difference in the project, but rather the skills I bring to the table. As the old saying goes, "a poor craftsman blames his tools"...
  - disordinary 9y ago
    Not to mention this whole society which expects everything for free has made it very hard for a small company to get into the market and innovate. If you think about how much money you can make from a professional tool and how much productivity it gains you then the price should be a no brainier.
  - H1Supreme 9y ago
    Except that your grandpa didn't have to pay a monthly subscription for his hammer. I really dislike the subscription model for tools.
charriu 9y ago
For a company, yes. Individual license is much cheaper, but the devs need to pay for it themselves.
- noir_lord 9y ago
  Exactly this, work would pay for it but I didn't ask, I already had a personal subscription and I use it at least as much outside of work as I do at work.
noir_lord 9y ago
https://www.jetbrains.com/idea/buy/#edition=personal https://www.jetbrains.com/idea/buy/#edition=personal 119 for Intellij 199 for everything. I didn't need everything since Intellij with plugins is everything (for the stuff I do).
pdpi 9y ago
You're probably looking at the "Businesses and Organizations" pricing, where the org pays £499/yr per user. The personal ("Individual Customers") license is starts at £199, and decreases to £159 then £119 for subsequent years. There's a bunch of groups (e.g. Open Source projects) that qualify for free or heavily discounted licenses too.
- mpd 9y ago
  And maybe importantly, you can use a personal license at work, on paid projects, etc. I've never been particularly bullish on Atom or Electron, but I think Jetbrains is going to be eating their lunch for awhile at least.
  - jbergens 9y ago
    You have to buy a personal license yourself, your organization cannot pay for it. I just don't want to pay for work tools, my employer should do that and then it is the higher price.
    - pdpi 9y ago
      That's fair. Personally, though I could get the business license and expense it, I choose to pay for it as a personal license because I use it personally as well, and I'd be happy to pay the individual license price either way.
ajmurmann 9y ago
I don't know where these numbers come from. I just looked it up and my subscription to all IDEs JetBrains had to offer is $149/year. Given how much time I spend in RubyMine and IntelliJ this is a great price. Even if I wouldn't every once in a while use AppCode and DataGrip as well. My only issue is lack of good Rust support.

kllrnohj 9y ago

IntelliJ ultimate doesn't include C++ support, though, which is an additional $100 to get the "all products" package. $250 for a fairly basic C++ IDE that insists you use Cmake is not exactly an "insane value" to me, but ymmv.

humanrebar 9y ago
C++ tooling is fairly abysmal. Partly because the language is so darn complex and full of warts. You basically need to implement most of a compiler to get meaningful IDE features. Point being, a higher price point for a C++ IDE makes a lot of sense.
- conistonwater 9y ago
  C++ has libclang, which is "most of a compiler" and pretty good, so if you can plug libclang into your editor, which most editors like emacs can do, then it's pretty close to an IDE.
  - humanrebar 9y ago
    The reasoning I've heard why an IDE doesn't do that (as opposed to a beefed-up text editor) is that an IDE needs to continue parsing and analyzing even in the face of an error in your source code. Because, presumably, you still want features like "jump to the definition of FoobarClient" to work even if you've misspelled something in a header included indirectly by FoobarClient.h. Compilers generally stop after the first set of errors in the first compilation unit. IDE indexers want to keep going as much as possible.
- kllrnohj 9y ago
  > a higher price point for a C++ IDE makes a lot of sense. Except Eclipse does C++ better than CLion and it's $250 cheaper. The only real advantage JetBrains has here is consistency with their other products, but then they ruined that by putting it in its own standalone product. So you can't have, say, a Python/Java/Kotlin project with a C++ extension library in a single IDE window, at least not if you're invested in JetBrains technology. Whereas that would work fine in vscode, Eclipse, Atom-IDE probably once it gets a C++ language server plugin which LLVM is working on, etc... Competition is good. IntelliJ is far from complete. That's really all I'm getting at. IntelliJ is not the pinacle, superior end-all-be-all IDE that some were saying here. It maybe is if you're in their primary supported set of languages. But it's not if you're at all on the fringes of what JetBrains supports (not that I'd necessarily call C++ a "fringe", either, but whatever)