It wasn't until quite recently in (PC land) that programming tools (namely compilers) were generally free, or even low cost.

In the past you made due with crippled 'Turbo' or 'Quick' versions of the Borland or Microsoft products. $79.99 vs $799.99 for the full-blown version. Some vendors sold C compilers for the price of a used car.

The PC C compiler market had a ton of players: Borland, Watcom, Symantec, Microsoft for 'real projects', while you had low-cost compilers from MIX and Mark Williams and some shareware products as well. You'll be paying extra for things like DOS Extenders, or sound and graphics libraries.

DJGPP came along and gave DOS guys not only a 32-bit DPMI environment but a free compiler!

By that time everyone was moving to Windows (except id software who gave us Quake as one last DOS classic). What did Visual C++ 6.0 cost? Anywhere from a couple hundred to a over a thousand USD depending on what version you got.

Apple makes Xcode freely available, Microsoft has Express editions of their products, and Google makes their Android tools available for download.

Plus, everything else can be had for free. Graphics library? Sound code? Physics engines? Go to Github.

> Apple makes Xcode freely available, Microsoft has Express editions of their products, and Google makes their Android tools available for download.

They do so because their engineers are paid with the money they get from another products.

Developers working on XCode are paid by Apple's margins. Android SDK developers by the licenses Google gets to have their applications on the handsets. Express developers get paid by the amount of Windows and Office installations out there.

Not so easy for the pour souls trying to live just on selling compiler tools.

> Plus, everything else can be had for free. Graphics library? Sound code? Physics engines? Go to Github.

And enjoy the pain of using rote code left behind by developers that lost interest.

I don't expect my tools to be free, but I do expect that if I pay for them, they do a better job than the free competition.

There are a plethora of free editors available. What does $70 get me for Sublime? Now compare to Vim,Emacs,textadept,notepad++,etc. Heck even Visual Studio 2012 Express is free to use all the editors.

  > I don't expect my tools to be free,
  > but I do expect that if I pay for
  > them, they do a better job than the
  > free competition.

That's an odd expectation. Does IIS better job than Apache or Nginx? Does VS do a better job than a standard Unix toolset, (or insert your favorite free developer platform). Does Cold Fusion do a better job than PHP, RoR, etc.? Did Visual Source Safe ever do anything better than anything else? Is Windows better than Linux/Unix?

History is full of commercial software that is not up to the bar set by free alternatives. You're not wxpected to buy any of it, but if you do, you should do some due diligence.

> Does IIS better job than Apache or Nginx?

Depends on the definition of the software's job. Nginx is better at serving web pages, IIS with an expensive support contract is better at shifting the blame away from me when it goes wrong :)

Put it in the cloud? Redhat? If thats the real reason youre using iis i'll eat my hat.

That works the other way too (Microsoft Office, Photoshop...) and people gladly pay for them.

> I don't expect my tools to be free, but I do expect that if I pay for them, they do a better job than the free competition.

Seems like an inverted way of thinking. The price of a products (software, hats, airplanes) is whatever the seller thinks people will be willing to pay. If the competition is free and is better, why are you even considering paying for something that is worse?

I paid $59 for ST2 in order to get ST2, not in order to fulfill some abstract notion of "better than the free competition". Of course, I already knew that the product worked for me, having tested it for several months, which the seller allows, no strings attached. If you buy ST2 based on the mistaken idea that it guarantees "better than the free competition", then you're making a philosophical mistake.

Now that I have paid, what should we expect? Some support, at least. The seller has a moral obligation to maintain and support the product. I think Jon Skinner has failed his customers in that respect; as the OP points out, ST2 development has been stalled for a very long time. I myself have reported a number (4, I think) of bugs that have received zero response.

That's your choice to make. Evaluate it yourself and decide if it's worth the money to you.

I personally think Vim is best for me but it comes with a huge cost of learning - probably into the thousands of dollars if you account for your productive time spent upfront.

Nobody forced you to spend $70 to test drive Sublime - so what's the problem?

> I personally think Vim is best for me but it comes with a huge cost of learning - probably into the thousands of dollars if you account for your productive time spent upfront.

Or free, if you find it de-stressing to unravel the beauty of all the features while sipping on some tea later in the night.

I use Sublime Text every day.

I have not paid for it. It only nags me with a small window about 1/10 of every file save operation. Right now I simply unconsciously close the small dialog box.

Honestly, I prefer it to every one of the others you have mentioned. I used Emacs to program Lisp (and I would not program Lisp in any other way, both are made for each other). I still use vim to edit remote files. I used EditPlus and Notepad++ before.

And I think it still does a better job than the competition, given that to me Sublime Text is also free.

Case in point: try Zen Coding (now renamed to some shit name) in any of the editors. It works, but only Sublime Text gives me a nice live preview of the resulting html/css.

"Software development has to be one of the only professions where we expect all our tools to be free."

I don't expect my tools to be free, but I do expect them to be available. I own Sublime Text 2 but abandoned it as a user and have no plans to upgrade to 3 because I am increasingly doing my programming on platforms (like ARM/Linux) that Sublime Text has no support for.

So I've gone back to using old standby open source editors, not because they are free-as-in-beer but because they are available (even if it means I have to compile them for the target platform myself). And because it is way easy to use the same tool on all platforms rather than constantly mentally mode-switching, I'm using the open source editors even when working on platforms where Sublime Text does work.

Hmm somebody took that seriously.. I use ST2 and paid for the license upgrade for ST3 already :|