Hacker News Reader

Comment by pents90 | Hacker News Reader

If you plan to be a professional software engineer, then I recommend just paying for the best tools. The price of one hour of an engineer's salary (give or take) can pay for the entire IntelliJ suite for a year.

View on HN

The definition of "best" is often subjective and may boil down to familiarity.

On the other hand, betting on open-source tooling may be a good way to increase the chances that your "best" tools will still be available in the future.

Sheesh, I wish I was worth $500/hr. I guess I'm not professional enough.

IntelliJ is $149 for a personal license.

That's still more like a couple of hours :)

That's for the full suite, too. Pycharm covers a lot of web dev beyond python and personal is only $89 first year, $71 second and $53 third.

And you don't need to continue your subscription unless you want continued updates. My PyCharm 'subscription' lapsed around two years ago, and I'm only planning on purchasing a new fallback license for the upcoming 2020.3 release because their excellent vim-mode plugin finally supports jump lists, but requires a newer version than the one I originally paid for - and I'm honestly happy to pay them again.

And you will love the new version! So much changed these last too years.

And they allow one to use the personal license at work, so long as no one at home is simultaneously using that license (I'm paraphrasing, and also cognizant that "at work" and "at home" now mean something radically different than this time last year) : https://sales.jetbrains.com/hc/en-gb/articles/207240855-Can-... (going up one level has all kind of interesting other licensing FAQs)

I actually still do that even though work bought me an IJ license because my personal _suite_ license covers more tools

Same. I like using the tools for any personal projects, and it's worth the price for the individual use subscription.

"All Products Pack" for individuals is $250/yr, first year, dropping to $200 for year 2 and $150 for year 3+.

Still quite a lot more than I make in an hour, but definitely not $500. Are you looking at the organization pricing?

For work I currently have to use an old Eclipse version in a slow virtual desktop infrastructure. But yeah I know it's worth paying for good tools.

give or take 14 hours for me!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com