What I find truly bizarre is how many software engineers, who are aware of how much they earn and how long it really takes to make software, are so resistant to paying anything for tools that make their job easier and faster. It blows my mind.
Take the Jetbrains IDEs. I don't mean to offend any VSC fans out there but the Jetbrains IDEs are simply better and more mature in every single way. For individual use, most of them are <$100/year.
In years past I saw this same struggle with IntelliJ vs Eclipse or even vim/emacs. The amount of time I saw people spend on tuning, fixing, tinkering, debugging and otherwise modifying their .vim or .emacs files or their various incompatible Eclipse plugins (eg famously there were 2 big big plugins for Eclipse at one point and neither of them completely worked). At least with vim/emacs it works over an SSH connection but Eclipse?
Why are so many resistant so other people earning a living particularly when the payoff (ie time-saved) is so easily quantifiable? And why do people who generally earn so much value their time so little?
> I don't mean to offend any VSC fans out there but the Jetbrains IDEs are simply better and more mature in every single way.
Yeah, no. Don't get me wrong, Jetbrains IDEs are great. But they're not as easy to extend, its proprietary nature makes it hard to debug when writing extensions.
I use neovim primarily, but I've got licenses for a bunch of other editors (Nova, Sublime, used to have IntelliJ). I do sincerely try them, but I keep going back to open source, extensible editors like vim, emacs, vscode... because I invariably need to tweak something in the editor, and doing so in the proprietary editors can be so damn painful.
Now, you do make a solid point though. I guess I probably should donate to neovim. Guess I'll go do that!
IntelliJ IDEA Community Edition is open source under Apache License 2.0: