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Skip is now free and open source

skip.dev

201–210 of 235 posts

Re: Skip is now free and open source

#201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>most people are not experiencing career-ending levels of performance from LLMs. You don't have to. Experiencing increased competition for jobs or lower pay for the same job (because less devs are needed for the same level of output) is just as bad. Experiencing increased competition for jobs or lower pay for the same job (because the AI industry imploded and the devs from that industry are now in the market) is just…

Third possibility negates the first two. Also, did VB6 put anyone out of work?

> Asking whether VB6 was out of work is the wrong question.

Asking whether you would like to work with a cowboy coded VB6 for low pay is a better one. The companies that have less cowboy coded apps are the companies everyone wants to work at. The more companies with cowboy coded apps, the harder it gets to get a job at a company with minimal cowboys imo.

VB6 apps haven't disappeared anymore than Cobol systems have.

"Third possibility negates the first two." It doesn't. Those 3 things don't need to all happen. Any of them alone is enough to significantly worsen the pay or quality of life of your average dev. And the 3 things don't even need to happen at the same time anyway.

Re: Skip is now free and open source

#202
post #137
post #70

> The plain truth is that developers expect to get their tools free of charge. This is an accurate, but damning indictment of how some of the most highly paid workers on the planet won't pay for tools. Unlike nearly every other profession. Folks, if you can afford it, please pay for quality software, instead of relying on FAANG and VC money to keep the tools going!

Software tools are not really tools like a knife. They are more like cooking recipes. Traditionally, people don't pay for cooking recipes, they may pay for cookbooks, that is a nice packaging around the recipes, or they may keep their recipes secret. Cooking recipes are like the software tools of chefs. The actual tools of developers are computers, which they pay for, like chefs pay for their knives. Software tools,…

I like the analogy. It is not perfect since recipes dont compose much (just a tiny bit) but a good analogy for the discussion.

Re: Skip is now free and open source

#203
post #118
post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been programming since ~1999 and anecdataly don't remember programmers having a culture of paying for their dev tools. On linux everything's free, and on windows I've used a plethora of freeware IDEs/compilers/etc. from turbo pascal, dev c++ (that's the name of it), later on eclipse took the stage in it's buggy mess and right before vscode there was atom. The only people that I know that used visual studio eithe…

Turbo Pascal was not freeware when it was new.

True. I never paid for it myself, but I think i got it from my uni. I had some of my fondest coding memories with it

Re: Skip is now free and open source

#204
post #118
post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been programming since ~1999 and anecdataly don't remember programmers having a culture of paying for their dev tools. On linux everything's free, and on windows I've used a plethora of freeware IDEs/compilers/etc. from turbo pascal, dev c++ (that's the name of it), later on eclipse took the stage in it's buggy mess and right before vscode there was atom. The only people that I know that used visual studio eithe…

Turbo Pascal was not freeware when it was new.

It did have a remarkably low price, though - less than a tenth of UCSD p-System or Topspeed. Even the competitors in the hobbyist space like the original IBM/Microsoft Pascal and DRI's Pascal/MT originally cost 4-5x as much.

Really, it was responsible for as big a step change in pricing of programming tools in the 1980s as GNU, BSD, and Linux were in the 90s.

Re: Skip is now free and open source

#205
post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The highest quality tools in the software development space tend to be FOSS > People build tools that they want to use, then share it with others because it's free to This maybe sounds true on the surface, but isn't really? Prior to VSCode, Visual Studio was the most-used editor by professional developers for a very long time, with Sublime Text and Jetbrains' IDEs being close behind, and the paid options are still…

I've been programming since ~1999 and anecdataly don't remember programmers having a culture of paying for their dev tools. On linux everything's free, and on windows I've used a plethora of freeware IDEs/compilers/etc. from turbo pascal, dev c++ (that's the name of it), later on eclipse took the stage in it's buggy mess and right before vscode there was atom. The only people that I know that used visual studio eithe…

As heavy Borland user I am quite sure none of their software was freeware.

Yes they had educational discounts, but that was it.

Re: Skip is now free and open source

#206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We do not want to invest in good tools and treat "Worse is Better" as some twisted virtue, and then wonder why everything sucks and most developer experience is stuck in 80s-90s technology paradigm. We deserve this. Not terribly surprising that one of the most true comments is at the bottom. The Stockholm syndrome by devs desperately wanting to believe that bad tools are good is insane . It's not even hard to see w…

Yeah, the downvotes were expected. Developers do not like being called out for the miserly and self-destructive bunch that we are. I was building an advance IDE for C and gave up when I realised that no one would buy it because "lol vim is free". Finally, I am gathering the strength to resume working on it, but only for personal use and with no expectation of selling more than 100 copies. What bothers me the most is…

Even worse is the entitlement, refusing to pay for the work of others while expecting to be paid for their own.

Hence why I am a strong advocate of dual licensing GPL + comercial, only be allowed to earn as much as willing to give upstream.

Re: Skip is now free and open source

#207
post #70

> The plain truth is that developers expect to get their tools free of charge. This is an accurate, but damning indictment of how some of the most highly paid workers on the planet won't pay for tools. Unlike nearly every other profession. Folks, if you can afford it, please pay for quality software, instead of relying on FAANG and VC money to keep the tools going!

I will never pay for anything intellij again. Not because I don't have the money, not because I prefer everything free like a happy little munchkin, but because I loathe them for creating the best IDE for ruby and keeping it paywalled for 10+ years despite java/kotlin and python editors having community versions. IMO it basically killed the language. Now that ruby is uncommon, they released a community edition like a…

What killed the language is being so married to Rails that no one else thinks of Ruby in another use cases.

And the performance, that has made people migrate to JIT powered platforms like Elixir/Phoenix on Erlang.

Re: Skip is now free and open source

#208
I'm interested in the subject but I've never heard about someone actually using Skip. Can someone share his experience, like how long it takes to get an Android app from a working iOS project. What kind of work is needed here?

Re: Skip is now free and open source

#209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

See my response below on the KMP question: the comparison with CMP mostly applies to Flutter as well. > near-native mobile apps (the difference is almost negligible) Not as of the advent of Liquid Glass on iOS (and, to a lesser extent, Material Expressive on Android). Flutter isn't going to be implementing these new interface conventions[1], and so the UI for these apps are stuck on the last generation and are alread…

Well sorry. But Android UI is bad just bad. The settings, the menus. Its bloated and almost as if they deliberately made it annoying to use. It just sucks.

Have you seen iOS or macOS settings, like ever? Especially on macOS, the UI is infantile, you have settings in different menus that change each other (mouse / touchpad scroll direction, two buttons in two menus, they change each other). On iOS you have amazing features like a wheel spinning forever without telling you there is a problem and what it is (like, for an app with in-app purchases, you must have a payment configured, otherwise the app installation just spins forever).

Compared to that, my (OxygenOS version of) Android UI is pretty good, concise, flexible and customisable if I want to. I hate the ambiguity of gestures, so I keep the buttons for navigation. I don't want everything splattered on the home screen, so I use a different launcher than the default. The menus are all logical.

Re: Skip is now free and open source

#210
post #70

> The plain truth is that developers expect to get their tools free of charge. This is an accurate, but damning indictment of how some of the most highly paid workers on the planet won't pay for tools. Unlike nearly every other profession. Folks, if you can afford it, please pay for quality software, instead of relying on FAANG and VC money to keep the tools going!

Employees don't pay for tools and usually have no say in which tools are bought. Car mechanics don't pay for spanners, their employers do.
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