Hacker News Reader

It's not ahistoric. Going back to the bad old days of forbiddingly high costs to developer tooling (not to mention the hardware needed to run it) would be a societal regression. Imagine needing a subscription to use a programming language in 2026, you'd be laughed out of the room. That's the world that the LLM providers are trying to drag us back to.

I've been doing this almost 40 years and have never had to pay for either.

Now, if you don't find gcc and neither of vi (and later vim) or emacs usable, well, let's not go there.

And the tools, they just keep getting better. Now I have both clang and gcc, and so many wayy-cool vim plugins to choose from.

I still pay for good hardware, but thanks to Linus and his ilk, I barely need to do that anymore.

The article covers this.