Amazing how capable tools can be, in industries that simply cannot get their work done without them and are willing to pay a healthy amount. Sometimes I wonder how good our dev tooling would be if we were willing to pay thousands a year, as opposed to the time-wasting bug-fest that is Xcode. Not singling out Apple, I’m sure all are comparably bad, it’s just what I happen to use :)
I worked at the company which used a proprietary compiler, IDE including debugger.. It was few thousands $ I believe. plus about the same amount for their proprietary JTAG adapter.
Worst software I ever used. Crashy, slow, critical features missing (example: debugger can show thread list... but not the stacks of other threads).
So no, I would not expect expensive commercial software to be better. It might generate 2% faster code or be certified, but the day to day experience would be terrible.
Leonard's Law: Software will be as bad as it's users can tolerate, and no worse. VHDL compilers are catastrophically bad, because electrical engineers have to tolerate them and make tape-out. FADECs don't normally crash airplanes because pilots don't like when that happens.
Yes! And if you're willing to spend tens of thousands of more dollars in court, not to mention the months litigation may take, you may even get that minimum baseline (at the expense of other features or bug fixes that don't fall under the written contract) after another 18 months of development time.
At most, it would be something like "our examples work, and we can provide support". I've never seen things like "IDE does not crash" written into contracts.
"Our examples are guaranteed to work (99.9%+ of the time...) on X configuration(s) in Y environmental conditions with Z functions." Is a pretty normal expectation when your paying thousands or tens of thousands per month per seat.
If you've literally never seen a guarantee like that and your company is actually paying that much money for a product, then it would be wise to shop around.
I can imagine why these things are expensive, as someone who occasionally cleans the local Olympic pool using an underwater vacuum cleaner (just a side gig to get free diving time). Salty or chlorinated water (and public pools usually use heavily chlorinated water) will dissolve almost anything over time - I've seen chlorinated water eat through plastic or neoprene in 2-3 years of use. Account to that mentioned vacuum cleaner is used practically every day, through the whole year, now you have to imagine that these things must be designed for heavy-duty things.
$4100 is peanuts compared to how expensive are (professional) underwater jobs.
> Salty or chlorinated water (and public pools usually use heavily chlorinated water) will dissolve almost anything over time
Metals, in particular. This is why in marine environments, special grades of stainless are used. Most commonly SAE 316 alloy (often marked with "A4", vs "A2" for regular stainless).
Another approach is the use of sacrificial anodes.
Where practical, it helps to rinse equipment with fresh water after use.
>Amazing how capable tools can be, in industries that simply cannot get their work done without them and are willing to pay a healthy amount.
The cost has to be that high, considering the annual market for hydraulic underwater chainsaws can not be more than a few hundred at best. Considering the environment these are expected to work in means the R&D costs are considerably higher than your bog standard chainsaw, with much few units to spread that cost over.
> Sometimes I wonder how good our dev tooling would be if we were willing to pay thousands a year, as opposed to the time-wasting bug-fest that is Xcode.
Look no further than embedded development. Everything costs a fortune, but makes Xcode look polished and a pleasure to use. And I really hate Xcode.
> Sometimes I wonder how good our dev tooling would be if we were willing to pay thousands a year, as opposed to the time-wasting bug-fest that is Xcode.
Jetbrains used to make an IDE for Objective C and Swift, but they sunset it last year due to weak sales. They still make fantastic tools for other programming languages though.
Enterprise is $6000 for the first year, then $2000/yr, but the main thing is it’s a perpetual license and includes (also perpetual) licenses for all MSDN downloads going right back to Windows 3.11 and QBASIC for DOS.
Apple don’t even let you downgrade iOS on your own devices.
That's the weird thing about software development, it can be done on a small budget. But large companies will find ways to spend money, i.e. by using loads of CI servers on AWS.
> I wonder how good our dev tooling would be if we were willing to pay thousands a year
Would we pay that directly or our employers? Also, how many would pay if the benefits are greater productivity for their employer instead of greater income from increased velocity?
Please also consider how much less inclusive and accessible computing would be if access to development tooling was placed behind such exorbitantly priced paywalls... The things we have at the moment aren't perfect, but I feel like the fact that the barrier of entry to programming is so low is an overwhelming positive that I couldn't see any level of bells and whistles justifying taking it away.
This is the most strained connection employed to engage in Apple-bashing that I've seen in quite some time.
I feel like we need an Apple-themed Godwin's Law - namely that no HN thread is complete without someone somehow managing to bring up Apple and how evil and undervalued they are.
The irony is that high-end Macs have been widely laughed at by people who don't have a use for them...while various creative and scientific sectors gladly pay that expense because unlike the commenters they're actually using them to make money; for example, the G5 and first-gen Mac Pro had enormous memory bandwidth that made them ideal for a lot of scientific data processing, medical imagery, running instruments, etc.
Allow me to wake you up:
Apple is a marketing company that doesn’t develop anything, rather just buying IP.
Their products are buggy and awful. Including and especially iphones and ios.
Everything else is marketing.
Yet here we are on a thread linking to a site showing an industrial underwater chainsaw, and someone has managed to connect it to tech (possibly, and normally hinting at the importance of FOSS) and managed to have a dig at Apple, Microsoft or Google.
Amazing how capable tools can be, in industries that simply cannot get their work done without them and are willing to pay a healthy amount. Sometimes I wonder how good our dev tooling would be if we were willing to pay thousands a year, as opposed to the time-wasting bug-fest that is Xcode. Not singling out Apple, I’m sure all are comparably bad, it’s just what I happen to use :)