Hacker News Reader

Comment by tc | Hacker News Reader

Programming languages and tools.

There are some counter-examples (e.g. Franz, LispWorks), but I think it's best to just consider this sort of work a labor of love.

View on HN

It costs $90 year to have the tool to get in iphone appstore.

The game console dev kits are very expensive (at least they have been when I looked)

Is MS Visual Dev thingy free?

There is free version of probably every language out there. But, that doesn't mean people aren't making money selling that language. Cobol compilers come to mind.

Visual Studio "Express" is free, but doesn't have many of the features of the for-pay versions. http://www.microsoft.com/exPress/download/ (Link also includes downloads for betas of Visual Studio 2010 & trial edition of for-pay versions.)

Visual Studio is quite expensive and yet it is selling very well to enterprise markets.

The trick is to pick the right customers.

I think you meant "The trick is to own the platform and then sell the tools you must use to develop on it at an absurdly high price."

Microsoft's compilers are generally free. What you pay for is the IDE. Even those come in free 'Express' editions.

Which platform is that? Windows? .NET? It's perfectly possible to target both without using Visual Studio. Microsoft has somehow[0] convinced people that using VS makes their lives easier. Lots of people pay for IntelliJ too. I think the trick here is to get people hooked on languages that have a lot of boilerplate and therefore require a powerful IDE to be usable, then sell people the IDE.

[0]Based on personal conversations with individual VS users, it actually appears that VS is what many developers want or think they want, not just something forced on them by management.

No, I wrote exactly what I meant. As others have pointed out you can use many other free tools, or even free versions of Visual Studio itself.

People pay absurd money (up to $10k per seat) for Team Edition which provides entire enterprise developer/tester/database/architect/team workflow instead of just IDE.

If you build something truly valuable people will pay, so long as they have the money. Like I said, the trick is to find the right people.

Visual Studio Express is free.

First, many of the enterprises don't pay all that much for Visual Studio. And, having previously been in the compiler business, I don't think very many compiler producers make any money at that game. If you could see the internal cost numbers for what it takes to put Visual Studio together and to maintain it, it would be hard to see how they could anywhere near profit from it. Back in the day, there was a report that they had 50 programmers on the C++ compiler alone.

Perhaps Walter Bright can make money writing compilers, but that would be an exception. I think that you will find that compilers and other language tools are sold in conjunction with something else.

Plenty of tenured professors and very well-paid research associates create these sorts of things...

UC, MIT, Bell Labs, Google, Microsoft, Sun, ... the list goes on and on.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com