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?
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...
Related from 2019: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21798033
OK I know reality is much less appealing than that. But I still prefer paper books than .CHM help files than really online documents.
Although personally, I don't know if jetbrains offers an actual physical copy (give me back the big box!).
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.
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.
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.
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".
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).
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.
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.
Pycharm is like driving an automatic, whereas VSCode feels like driving manual. It is a tradeoff as always, so ymmv.
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?
Also the built-in type checker is just bad
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".