I may have to apologize that my little throwaway comment is stirring up so much commotion. No, it wasn't "contributing to the discussion", but then there wasn't a whole lot of "discussion" going on there - Alice posted about paying (or not) for compilers and such and I wanted to comment that you pay for programming in more than just the price of tools. (And a point could be made that we pay in more than time as well, as it sure costs me a chunk of sanity every time I spend an evening trying to hunt down some stupid bug somewhere).
When compilers were expensive, did people pay for them? Yes. They didn't just hand-type assembly op codes into a hex editor (well, some of us did). Because the compiler saved uncounted amounts of time compared to that. Which people valued enough to pay for. "Here's a new tool that allows you to code much more by taking care of many fiddly under-the-hood details, for a price" is a value proposition - it's up to us to choose, but it's not a foregone decision. 🤷
Colin the Mathmo (npub1s4h…qs84) Johnny Than (npub13ps…gm9l)
