3 ms·

Is this supposed to be satire? Being a hobbyist and learning to program in the 80s meant my dad shelling out hundreds of dollars for THINK Lightspeed Pascal, a

Is this supposed to be satire? Being a hobbyist and learning to program in the 80s meant my dad shelling out hundreds of dollars for THINK Lightspeed Pascal, and yet, somehow I and many others managed to learn to program and become hobbyists and finally professional programmers. They'll sell you a full-featured, modern IDE with all the pro features uncrippled for a measly $5. That's not a death blow to hobbyists, that's maybe one of the cheapest hobbies on the planet.

msg 16y ago
It was free, so I don't how you can call it anything but erecting a barrier to entry to developing POSIX apps on the Mac. You don't just need $5, you need a credit card number. Like many other things in computing, the price to play has gotten steadily cheaper over time. When it gets more expensive we should ask why. It makes sense for Apple's future of curated computing, but it's definitely another dick move.
- msbarnett 16y ago
  > When it gets more expensive we should ask why. They just plowed thousands of engineering man-hours into significantly overhauling both the infrastructure (huge amount of work around LLVM) and interface of Xcode for the Xcode 4 release, addressing a substantive number of long-standing complaints along the way. This release is by far the biggest overhaul of the product in the last decade. All of those engineers cost a lot of money. They aren't working on this out of charity. That's why. I simply do not understand why people are hung up on an IDE that is the product of thousands of engineering man-hours costing as much as a single foot long sandwich slapped together by a bored teenager in 60 seconds.
  - potatolicious 16y ago
    A single footlong sandwich may be a significant sum for people not in Western, industrialized countries. But that point is secondary to the fact that even $5 is a barrier for beginners. I think people are objecting because they themselves happened into programming as a passion and career - I know I did. They found some tool, probably for free (QBASIC for me) that got their feet wet initially, and that's how they got their start. A beginner who is neither sure nor convinced that programming is a good thing to pursue is unlikely to spend even a footlong's worth of money on it, and we've lost yet more potential future engineers. Also, the fact that Apple has poured a significant investment into building these tools says nothing - they've been pouring a significant investment into their dev tools for years and offered it for free. Their competitors have also poured enormous sums into dev tools that are available for free. When the status quo of the industry is free tools (and the few that are for-pay are getting cheaper every year), one can question why Apple is the odd man out in a sudden reversal.
    - msbarnett 16y ago
      > A beginner who is neither sure nor convinced that programming is a good thing to pursue is unlikely to spend even a footlong's worth of money on it, and we've lost yet more potential future engineers. Sure. And Xcode would probably scare them off anyways, because it's decidedly not set up to be friendly to beginners. This is a non-issue. Beginning programmers on the Mac should under no circumstances go grab Xcode unless they want to feel utterly bewildered. The $5 charge is utterly beside the point, here. One wonders how you imagine anyone ever gets into a hobby with more than a $5 barrier to entry. > Also, the fact that Apple has poured a significant investment into building these tools says nothing - they've been pouring a significant investment into their dev tools for years and offered it for free. They seem to have drastically increased the amount of effort they're putting into it, probably because of the increased iOS dev audience. That extra effort probably justifies the minor $5 price increase. > Their competitors have also poured enormous sums into dev tools that are available for free. Which competitors would those be? Microsoft isn't giving their professional tools away for free, just a drastically cut down starter edition. Sun plowed a ton of cash into NetBeans, but following their financial lead seems ill-advised.
rbanffy 16y ago
> with all the pro features uncrippled Do you mean Eclipse, NetBeans or any other modern, professional IDE is crippled? This is a death blow to Apple hobbyists who live in parts of the world that don't have access to the Mac App Store. All three of them, most probably.
- msbarnett 16y ago
  Had in mind Visual Studio Express (heavily crippled vs the purchased editions), the commercial Ada and Lisp IDEs whose free versions have onerous limitations, etc. There's a lot out there beyond the java IDEs. And before we hold a eulogy for the vast swaths of poor put upon hobbyist devs who can't raise $5 or access the App store, you might want to establish the existence of these people actually having these problems rather than asking us to be outraged at a scenario in your imagination.
  - rbanffy 16y ago
    Neither Eclipse nor NetBeans can be called Java IDEs more than Emacs can be called a Lisp IDE. I develop in Python under Eclipse and I prefer Eclipse for general Java development. I prefer NetBeans for JavaME stuff and I absolutely love Emacs for Python, but there are things that Eclipse + Pydev do better (specially App Engine stuff). For what I know, the support for Roby and Rails in NetBeans is also very good. Of course, Emacs is my Lisp (Clojure) IDE of choice. As for the idiotic pricing of Xcode 4, I am bothered not by the price tag and the restrictions it imposes on some, but by the fact Apple's accountants interpret SOX in unique and singularly stupid ways.
    - gtani 16y ago
      python IDE's/text editor/whatevers: komodo Edit (the full $300 version) works very nicely for perl/python/ruby (never tried tcl), if you get somebody to buy if for you (no BizSpark that i can see). I have't tried the intelliJ IDEA series (pyCharm, phpStorm, etc) but based on the scala plugin, I betcha they're quite solid as well. http://devnet.jetbrains.net/thread/287853;jsessionid=521D68CFC588254CC558818A5930BC9D http://devnet.jetbrains.net/thread/287853;jsessionid=521D68C... XCode Pricing: kinda like pinboard.in at $9.26, just enough to deter somebody from buying, for whatever reason.

msg 16y ago

It was free, so I don't how you can call it anything but erecting a barrier to entry to developing POSIX apps on the Mac. You don't just need $5, you need a credit card number. Like many other things in computing, the price to play has gotten steadily cheaper over time. When it gets more expensive we should ask why. It makes sense for Apple's future of curated computing, but it's definitely another dick move.

msbarnett 16y ago
> When it gets more expensive we should ask why. They just plowed thousands of engineering man-hours into significantly overhauling both the infrastructure (huge amount of work around LLVM) and interface of Xcode for the Xcode 4 release, addressing a substantive number of long-standing complaints along the way. This release is by far the biggest overhaul of the product in the last decade. All of those engineers cost a lot of money. They aren't working on this out of charity. That's why. I simply do not understand why people are hung up on an IDE that is the product of thousands of engineering man-hours costing as much as a single foot long sandwich slapped together by a bored teenager in 60 seconds.
- potatolicious 16y ago
  A single footlong sandwich may be a significant sum for people not in Western, industrialized countries. But that point is secondary to the fact that even $5 is a barrier for beginners. I think people are objecting because they themselves happened into programming as a passion and career - I know I did. They found some tool, probably for free (QBASIC for me) that got their feet wet initially, and that's how they got their start. A beginner who is neither sure nor convinced that programming is a good thing to pursue is unlikely to spend even a footlong's worth of money on it, and we've lost yet more potential future engineers. Also, the fact that Apple has poured a significant investment into building these tools says nothing - they've been pouring a significant investment into their dev tools for years and offered it for free. Their competitors have also poured enormous sums into dev tools that are available for free. When the status quo of the industry is free tools (and the few that are for-pay are getting cheaper every year), one can question why Apple is the odd man out in a sudden reversal.
  - msbarnett 16y ago
    > A beginner who is neither sure nor convinced that programming is a good thing to pursue is unlikely to spend even a footlong's worth of money on it, and we've lost yet more potential future engineers. Sure. And Xcode would probably scare them off anyways, because it's decidedly not set up to be friendly to beginners. This is a non-issue. Beginning programmers on the Mac should under no circumstances go grab Xcode unless they want to feel utterly bewildered. The $5 charge is utterly beside the point, here. One wonders how you imagine anyone ever gets into a hobby with more than a $5 barrier to entry. > Also, the fact that Apple has poured a significant investment into building these tools says nothing - they've been pouring a significant investment into their dev tools for years and offered it for free. They seem to have drastically increased the amount of effort they're putting into it, probably because of the increased iOS dev audience. That extra effort probably justifies the minor $5 price increase. > Their competitors have also poured enormous sums into dev tools that are available for free. Which competitors would those be? Microsoft isn't giving their professional tools away for free, just a drastically cut down starter edition. Sun plowed a ton of cash into NetBeans, but following their financial lead seems ill-advised.

rbanffy 16y ago

> with all the pro features uncrippled Do you mean Eclipse, NetBeans or any other modern, professional IDE is crippled? This is a death blow to Apple hobbyists who live in parts of the world that don't have access to the Mac App Store. All three of them, most probably.

msbarnett 16y ago
Had in mind Visual Studio Express (heavily crippled vs the purchased editions), the commercial Ada and Lisp IDEs whose free versions have onerous limitations, etc. There's a lot out there beyond the java IDEs. And before we hold a eulogy for the vast swaths of poor put upon hobbyist devs who can't raise $5 or access the App store, you might want to establish the existence of these people actually having these problems rather than asking us to be outraged at a scenario in your imagination.
- rbanffy 16y ago
  Neither Eclipse nor NetBeans can be called Java IDEs more than Emacs can be called a Lisp IDE. I develop in Python under Eclipse and I prefer Eclipse for general Java development. I prefer NetBeans for JavaME stuff and I absolutely love Emacs for Python, but there are things that Eclipse + Pydev do better (specially App Engine stuff). For what I know, the support for Roby and Rails in NetBeans is also very good. Of course, Emacs is my Lisp (Clojure) IDE of choice. As for the idiotic pricing of Xcode 4, I am bothered not by the price tag and the restrictions it imposes on some, but by the fact Apple's accountants interpret SOX in unique and singularly stupid ways.
  - gtani 16y ago
    python IDE's/text editor/whatevers: komodo Edit (the full $300 version) works very nicely for perl/python/ruby (never tried tcl), if you get somebody to buy if for you (no BizSpark that i can see). I have't tried the intelliJ IDEA series (pyCharm, phpStorm, etc) but based on the scala plugin, I betcha they're quite solid as well. http://devnet.jetbrains.net/thread/287853;jsessionid=521D68CFC588254CC558818A5930BC9D http://devnet.jetbrains.net/thread/287853;jsessionid=521D68C... XCode Pricing: kinda like pinboard.in at $9.26, just enough to deter somebody from buying, for whatever reason.