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Comment by nickserv | Hacker News Reader

I've been doing Python development for a long time, since when 2.4 was the hottest thing.

I've used the language for all sorts of things: web apps, web APIs, GUI tools, image manipulation, data processing and visualization, some data science, machine learning more recently.

I've used many IDEs over the years, currently on PyCharm.

Just to qualify the feedback.

Pros:

- It looks very pretty.

- Some nice time saving features.

Cons:

- Mac only.

- Subscription business model.

- Having to tie the code to the IDE.

Any one of the con's would be a deal breaker for me.

Overall I'm not sure what the target market is. Maybe I'm just too used to having free and/or libre tooling.

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> currently on PyCharm. ... Cons: Subscription business model. ... Any one of the con's would be a deal breaker for me.

I'm curious to understand this better (as a fan of JetBrains): do you currently use PyCharm Community or does the JetBrains model not count as a subscription for you?

Chiming in here, Jetbrains is a subscription model, but with a very important qualifier in the form of a perpetual fallback license once you stop paying. It's an important distinction, and I wish more businesses would follow this model.

Is the Jetbrain model basically the pricing model of early era (pre 2000s) IDEs? I remember back then developers had to pay for editors and compilers, which usually came with a huge amount of manuals. And then they could install patches until a new major version rolled out. I'm actually OK with that model, if they still ship manuals in paper.

Yeah, I think it's pretty similar. I definitely remember purchasing copies of the software like Borland C++ / Visual Studio / etc. that would essentially cover the major version number and all patch related updates.

Although personally, I don't know if jetbrains offers an actual physical copy (give me back the big box!).

I love big boxes too! The manuals also show that developers really really know their products.

It sucks that fast iteration is the new normal nowadays. It's not a bad thing if developers are eager to get their hands on a cutting edge feature, but I believe doing things slower but more thoroughly has its merit.

No they did not show that. They showed that the project team for the tools included more than developers.

It included qualified technical writers. It included project managers would would ensure that if somethiung was added there was a specification so that it could be documented.

ie developers were not allowed to get away with only doing a partial job.

I think that's a good thing, developers not allowed to get away with partial job.

Oracle RDBMS used to come with 20+ books, for PL/SQL, C bindings, Fortran etc etc... I don't want those days back!

I'd like to take a cup of coffee, take out one of those books (not super interested in Oracle TBH but could be some other low level stuffs) and read it through.

OK I know reality is much less appealing than that. But I still prefer paper books than .CHM help files than really online documents.

i have the minix book i am looking to do this with; the last time i read a book in this style was the TCP/IP book (the oversized wide one).

Jetbrains originally had a "buy upgrade model". You paid full price for the first one, and then it was half price for upgrades beyond that.

To Jetbrains, this had the problem of feast or famine and the non-predictable income. They'd need to release an upgrade when they needed money and they would hold off on releasing features as a minor release so that they could justify an upgrade later.

At some point (I want to say 2014 based on my licensing), they trial ballooned a subscription only model and got some extreme pushback about it. With that feed/pushback Jetbrains went to the perpetual fallback and subscription. It addresses the subscription issue - they now have a revenue stream rather than the upgrade. It also means that they do a lot of minor releases now with new features throughout the year.

The other part of the perpetual fallback is that if you have a subscription to a version for a year, you will always be able to use that version even if you cancel your subscription. If I canceled my subscription, I'd be able to use IntelliJ 2024.2 forever. I'm currently running 2024.3.3

One other bit on the subscription - it gets less expensive each year. I've got an all products pack for single user. My next yearly billing will be $173.00. https://www.jetbrains.com/store/?section=personal&billing=ye... - the 3rd year and onwards (I've been a Jetbrains used since the end of the world sale - https://blog.jetbrains.com/blog/2012/12/20/jetbrains-end-of-... )

https://sales.jetbrains.com/hc/en-gb/articles/207240845-What...

Yeah, I was wondering if that was it. Practically it still ends up being a subscription for me because I actually do want the updates, but I guess that's the point—it's my choice to keep paying because I like what they're doing. If I stop liking I can stop paying.

> perpetual fallback license

Are you sure this isn't what Scripton is offering? From the pricing page:

> All updates included while subscription is active

That doesn't preclude the idea that what stops when your subscription ends is the updates, not use at all. But I genuinely don't know either way.

Couple things.

1. Perpetual fallback licenses on SaaS products are (unfortunately) not terribly common - so if it's not explicitly stated then you can bet your bottom dollar that it's highly unlikely.

2. From the dev themselves in another part of this post, "The plan for now is just subscriptions. However, I would like to eventually have something like Jetbrains' "perpetual fallback license" where you can keep using up to a particular version after, say, a year of subscription".

> 1. Perpetual fallback licenses on SaaS products are (unfortunately) not terribly common - so if it's not explicitly stated then you can bet your bottom dollar that it's highly unlikely.

I also think perpetual fallback licenses are great and will def use this for hackerman.ai text editor (when released later this year).

I also wish devs would start offer one time payments again (especially for downloadable software).

re: 2: yep, I see that comment now...

Techsmith does this as well and I love it. I'm still on a perfectly usable 5 year old version of Camtasia.

https://www.techsmith.com/

Not the OP, but I have a subscription to PyCharm through work and still think it's inferior to VSCode. And I don't love vscode...

In general, subscriptions are a high bar for me. You typically pay for them year after year but see minimal improvements. Back when I was doing Java development, I paid for my own copy of Idea just to get to use something good. But I don't think I would do that for a subscription.

> I have a subscription to PyCharm through work and still think it's inferior to VSCode

I'm trying to figure out how anyone could think that. Every time I switch to VS Code I feel hamstrung.

What do you find to be inferior?

While I also felt limited in vscode compared to pycharm, it definitely feels more polished. I've had some bugs in pycharm for years with no progress on their issue tracker, and new features feel a bit slopilly implemented.

Also the built-in type checker is just bad

PyCharm is much more sluggish. And I have had a lot more luck using dev containers in VSCode than PyCharm. In general, I find the process of getting an interpretter set up much nicer in VSCode.

Both work for Python syntax highlighting. But I've had several bugs in PyCharm that took several versions to get fixed. To be fair, individual extensions in VSCode can also have bugs, but I've generally found it easier to work around issues because it is less "bundled".

I switched from VSCode to Pycharm a few years back. Both are very decent IDE's, but Pycharm feels to me more polished.

Pycharm is like driving an automatic, whereas VSCode feels like driving manual. It is a tradeoff as always, so ymmv.

I use PyCharm community edition for personal/OSS projects.

At work I do have the all products pack since we support multiple programming languages for our client libraries and custom integrations.

My only major complaint with jetbrains is having a separate IDE for .NET vs everything else.

I was interested, but Mac and subscription kill it for me. Good luck to them, though.

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