yes, I realised my mistake of not seeing the For individuals tab... 89 USD is a little more palatable.
The thing I do not agree is that you have to pay for tools in order to be a professional. That is quite elitist. People make careers out of free platforms like Linux so for an IDE is not asking much to have a good tool for free. The community benefits from labor put into developing a free tool.
> The thing I do not agree is that you have to pay for tools in order to be a professional.
Absolutely not! You don't have to pay, and there's tons of free tools which are top rate.
What I said is that if you're a professional, you're able to pay for the tools that are worth it. If Phpstorm is worth it (and I think it is, but many devs I respect feel otherwise), $200 is deeply affordable by Western standards.
As a professional, you should have a budget for things like software licenses, books, donations to open source projects you really like, etc., whether that comes out of your funds as a consultant, or team's budget, etc. If your employer is too stingy to cover things like Phpstorm licenses...they're not treating you like a professional.
(Again, in first world/Western countries. Budgets and pay scales are different in some places!)
> I am sorry if I misinterpreted you, but that was precisely what you said.
If you have the money to spend on tools, but think Linux or VS Code is best, that's fine.
If OS X would be better for you, but you use Linux because you can't afford the tools you need, that's a problem.
Being able to find the money for something doesn't mean you have to spend the money. At the price point of a few hundred dollars a year or less, my concern is what's best, not what's cheapest. The company I work for will happily buy a Phpstorm license for any dev who wants one, but some are happy with VS Code, and one holdout is still using NetBeans. Nothing wrong with that!
I can't even convince IT to put an SSD or increase my RAM from 8GB to 16 on this workstation. There's a process that I tried to go through and later my boss said they spent two hours on the phone with IT but it went nowhere so I asked my boss to not waste any more time on this nonsense.
I can't imagine having to justify a subscription to IntelliJ at this workplace. At least I imagine you can bring your own license to Jetbrains on a work computer here, at least that is my understanding and I won't ask anyone lest they say I am wrong!
Other professionals go to bazaar and flea markets to get their tools at a discount, but they still have to pay for them.
Just in IT it is now fashionable to feel entitled to earn money without buying tools, then comes dual licenses, closing doors or acquisitions because devs don't pay supermarket with pull requests.
The thing I do not agree is that you have to pay for tools in order to be a professional. That is quite elitist. People make careers out of free platforms like Linux so for an IDE is not asking much to have a good tool for free. The community benefits from labor put into developing a free tool.