Amazing how capable tools can be, in industries that simply cannot get their work done without them and are willing to pay a healthy amount. Sometimes I wonder how good our dev tooling would be if we were willing to pay thousands a year, as opposed to the time-wasting bug-fest that is Xcode. Not singling out Apple, I’m sure all are comparably bad, it’s just what I happen to use :)
Worst software I ever used. Crashy, slow, critical features missing (example: debugger can show thread list... but not the stacks of other threads).
So no, I would not expect expensive commercial software to be better. It might generate 2% faster code or be certified, but the day to day experience would be terrible.
They both were discovered by former colleagues of mine. And named by me.
I'm sure there are shady vendors of high end software products, but at those price ranges there's no reason to choose them over established names.
If you've literally never seen a guarantee like that and your company is actually paying that much money for a product, then it would be wise to shop around.
Xcode is most certainly not free, at the minimum you need an apple computer. So you must pay apple to use it.
If it sucks, it's not because a lack of money, it's because Apple doesn't care.
$4100 is peanuts compared to how expensive are (professional) underwater jobs.
Metals, in particular. This is why in marine environments, special grades of stainless are used. Most commonly SAE 316 alloy (often marked with "A4", vs "A2" for regular stainless).
Another approach is the use of sacrificial anodes.
Where practical, it helps to rinse equipment with fresh water after use.
https://www.hse.gov.uk/foi/internalops/sims/cactus/5_02_18.h...
The cost has to be that high, considering the annual market for hydraulic underwater chainsaws can not be more than a few hundred at best. Considering the environment these are expected to work in means the R&D costs are considerably higher than your bog standard chainsaw, with much few units to spread that cost over.
Look no further than embedded development. Everything costs a fortune, but makes Xcode look polished and a pleasure to use. And I really hate Xcode.
Easily 100-150k per seat for mixed signal chip design. Cost as much or more than the salary of the person using it.
Jetbrains used to make an IDE for Objective C and Swift, but they sunset it last year due to weak sales. They still make fantastic tools for other programming languages though.
And yeah. It certainly is a better tool than Xcode.
Apple don’t even let you downgrade iOS on your own devices.
Compare and contrast.
Would we pay that directly or our employers? Also, how many would pay if the benefits are greater productivity for their employer instead of greater income from increased velocity?
That chainsaw is a yearly subscription? I'd rather pay once for a chainsaw.
I feel like we need an Apple-themed Godwin's Law - namely that no HN thread is complete without someone somehow managing to bring up Apple and how evil and undervalued they are.
The irony is that high-end Macs have been widely laughed at by people who don't have a use for them...while various creative and scientific sectors gladly pay that expense because unlike the commenters they're actually using them to make money; for example, the G5 and first-gen Mac Pro had enormous memory bandwidth that made them ideal for a lot of scientific data processing, medical imagery, running instruments, etc.
Also, gently, note:
> Not singling out Apple, I’m sure all are comparably bad, it’s just what I happen to use :)
The Xcode thing is often an in-joke with iOS developers.
I’ve been here 11 years and see this all the time.
This, however, is not an instance of it.
Yet here we are on a thread linking to a site showing an industrial underwater chainsaw, and someone has managed to connect it to tech (possibly, and normally hinting at the importance of FOSS) and managed to have a dig at Apple, Microsoft or Google.