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Comment by 6thaccount2 | Hacker News Reader

Oh I agree Dyalog is super nice and that it is free for personal/hobby use, but using it at work costs ~1k/year. I'm always a bit leery working with such systems when most software is now free. If your company already uses it, that's great and if they already have a site license it is essentially zero cost to use from your point. If you're that weird guy asking to use the heiroglyphics language...it can be a tough sell to management and IT.

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> most software is now free

Is it?

Language wise yes. Sorry if I wasn't clear.

C# => Free; Java => Free; Common Lisp => SBCL is Free; Python => Free; Ruby => Free; C => Free; C++ => Free; Rust => Free; Haskell => Free; JavaScript => Free; Smalltalk => Pharo is Free; Perl => Free; Forth => GForth is Free; Fortran => GFortran is Free; Kotlin => Free; Scala => Free; Clojure => Free;

Now there are some paid languages like Wolfram Mathematica, Allegro Common Lisp, Lispworks Common Lisp, Delphi Pascal, Dyalog APL, IBM Fortran and some languages with paid tools like Visual Studio for .NET and the Ultimate Jetbrains IDEA IDE for Java/Kotlin/Scala. Clojure has the paid "Cursive" IDE to go with the Jetbrains IDE. However, you can use other Free IDEs to go with most paid tools (Ex: you can use several alternative IDEs for C# and Emacs for Clojure). Also, the "paid" languages are fairly niche in comparison to the free ones at the top. How many people do you know writing Dyalog APL, IBM Fortran, Delphi, and Lisp works programs? How many people do you know writing C#, JavaScript, Java, C, and Python?

If we're just talking about software in general, then yes there is a TON of expensive and closed source programs and I don't expect that to change anytime soon.

All of the Visual Studio supported languages are accessible for free with the Community editions. The paid versions give you more advanced features for understanding, debugging or profiling. You can see the differences at [0]. Personally, I use VS2019 Professional at work, VS2019 Community at home. I don't really miss the extra Professional features at home, but I do wish I had some of the Enterprise features at work.

[0] https://visualstudio.microsoft.com/vs/compare/

That is kind of my whole point though. I'm not working on open source software or at a tiny company, so it isn't free. I'm not sure if I could commercially use it as a solo dev either. Most community editions aren't much better than a trial license in that regard. Let me know if I misunderstand though. I'm not the best at license stuff.

> I'm not sure if I could commercially use it as a solo dev either.

Yes, you can. There's no restriction on using the Community edition of Visual Studio for commercial products. I think there may have been initially when MS offered a free edition (initially called Express), and SQL Server express, now Compact edition, has some limitations like only one concurrent connection, and I think a 1 GB DB size limit.

There's also VS Code, which is completely free and has great support for a lot of languages through extensions.

Edit: should note, too, that thw .Net compilers have shipped with the .Net Framework since v1.0. So, technically, you dont even need Visual Studio to build a .Net app. Likewise for C++, MS has included their optimizing compiler with the Windows SDK, I think since WinXP, may have been more recent. You dont get a friendly debugger (youd need to us WinDbG) or IDE experience, but you can build.

Fair enough, thanks.

I think there's a good chance for any company paying a developer to write something that a good chunk of their software includes free and open source stuff,especially if you include cloud resources. Even Azure is pretty heavy on Linux, and other Microsoft technologies have gone free (if not also open source) in an effort to retain mindshare. Java is free, C# is free, eclipse is free, many, many libraries and tools are free.

At this point its probably easier to list the non-free things in the average stack or development pipeline than the free things.

I think you've said it best. Yes there is now more free in most given setups than non-free.

I contrast this with when you paid for your compiler and all tools in most cases.

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