I don't know, there used to be IDE vendors that sold stuff to enterprises and offered freebies for educational purposes. Down the line there will be free offerings by the established players as well as OSS models you can run locally. Right now this is of course not enjoyable on existing hardware that a middle schooler might be using, put a bit more RAM into the MacBook Neo and this might change.
Programming Used to Be Free
21–30 of 76 posts
Re: Programming Used to Be Free
#22Programming is freer, faster, more shared, and has more corporate sponsorship than ever before. You think it was always this easy to find high quality docs and packages written by others for free?
Yep, this is ahistoric. You used to have to pay for your compiler, not to mention a useable IDE.
Re: Programming Used to Be Free
#23Programming is free if you do not consider price of your time. If you consider it, it is much higher than AI-associated costs. And even with AI-associated costs, it is still much cheaper than most other engineering professions, where physical realization is orders of magnitude more costly.
Re: Programming Used to Be Free
#24Earlier quoted context omitted.
No one is "forcing" you to drive a car to get to work, either. You could walk 20 miles if you live somewhere without decent public transit. My view is that the author is talking about having a knowledge of career-relevant skills, developed for free. If you can't develop the skills to be competitive in an interview without using LLMs, then you are forced by societal factors to use the LLMs.
was it developed for free? he has a computer, which i'm assuming he paid for. and you can run LLMs locally. and those will catch up eventually. there has always been a moat, with varying levels of depth. do you have electricity? do you have a computer? can you afford internet?
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Re: Programming Used to Be Free
#25Programming is freer, faster, more shared, and has more corporate sponsorship than ever before. You think it was always this easy to find high quality docs and packages written by others for free?
Yep, this is ahistoric. You used to have to pay for your compiler, not to mention a useable IDE.
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.
Re: Programming Used to Be Free
#26I also learned programming on QBASIC around the same time frame, but in my case it was mostly because all the old 90's computers were getting thrown away at that time, so there were plenty of parts around for a kid to learn about computers without breaking anything expensive. It was pretty easy back then to find software that would work on those machines on the internet, too. I'm not so sure it would be as easy for y…
Sitting down for the first time to QBASIC after years of Apple ][ BASIC, my first thought was a gleeful ‘No line numbers!’
Re: Programming Used to Be Free
#27Programming is free if you do not consider price of your time. If you consider it, it is much higher than AI-associated costs. And even with AI-associated costs, it is still much cheaper than most other engineering professions, where physical realization is orders of magnitude more costly.
Well of course. The article is about the author's experience of being a young person with no money but plenty of time.
This is exactly the kind of person that could be excluded by a programming culture that requires extensive use of LLMs.
Re: Programming Used to Be Free
#28Traveling used to be free. You could walk, run or swim anywhere you wanted. Now these cars and airplanes are ruining travel, they are expensive and hard to maintain. You have to buy tickets from vendors and the experience is completely different than walking.
You need to go back thousands of years to find a time when all traveling was walking, running or swimming.
Re: Programming Used to Be Free
#29Earlier quoted context omitted.
they also addressed this and talked about how competitive models can't run on the weaker hardware most people have
And prior to the desktop computer, you had to actually go work at a laboratory in order to do any programming whatsoever, which required significant amounts of educational and social access What’s the point? Writing deploying and delivering software has never been as accessible as it has ever been Much like the author I learned on my own too and with a lot less help because I didn’t have a parent even guiding me thro…
that is literally what this article is about, how returning to that is a bad thing
Re: Programming Used to Be Free
#30Traveling used to be free. You could walk, run or swim anywhere you wanted. Now these cars and airplanes are ruining travel, they are expensive and hard to maintain. You have to buy tickets from vendors and the experience is completely different than walking.
You need to go back thousands of years to find a time when all traveling was walking, running or swimming.
But it was free!