Hacker News Reader

It's not terribly common anymore, but people used to pay for the Coldfusion programming language...well at least a compiler/interpreter for it. Outside of some third-party things like OpenBluedragon and Railo, if you wanted to deploy Coldfusion in any capacity, you had to pay Macromedia/Adobe for a license.

I don't know of any companies that are still using Coldfusion and I haven't had to touch it since 2012 (thank god), but it certainly was a common thing for awhile.

Yes you used to have to pay for your development tools (borland was a big player in the space). Even microsoft tools weren't free

Visual Studio Enterprise is expensive as hell and C# is the king of the enterprise, together with Java which runs on enterprise Oracle App servers

Those are the words a company can use to make me instantly turn down a position. Are you reading directly from the noperonomicon?

Embedded compilers/IDE as well.

LabView is really popular in physical engineering circles and it costs over $5,000 per copy.

MatLab