So, is it fair to say that you're not impressed by TFA?
“Common statement which is generally true”
“A single out of context example where the above statement isn’t true, or a statement asserting it is not true no more than 5% of the time.”
is so common.
Once you start seeing this sort of thing, you see it everywhere on HN and it’s impossible to stop seeing.
It’s almost like a mind trap for developers, that once we see a general idea we immediately snap into disproof mode instead of thinking about ways to more charitably interpret the argument.
So on a different level, perhaps it is hard to impress developers.
Have you seen the Magit kickstarter[1]?
Magit is one of Emacs' killer apps and it's known and loved by virtually all of its users, who are almost all developers..
When its maintainer opened a kickstarter to work on it for a year, it was more than fully funded by nearly 2000 backers.
So, yes, developers are willing to pay for quality software.
But, yeah, overall this is a gift economy where people take what's freely given but also give back to the community in some way.
[1] - https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1681258897/its-magit-th...
If you are one of the fortunate few who can thread that needle, congratulations, for you too can now revel in the financial security that only a moderately popular kickstarter can bring. Don’t spend it all in one place.
I feel that we are in a position where we can estimate the amount of work and the dedication that a team has put into a great product. I have paid for many of the great softwares that run on my machine because of this knowledge.
I do think there is a significant segment of developers who are really gung-ho about free software politics and refuse on moral grounds to pay for software ever. So that might be what you're seeing.
I don't think this is true. There are lots of things that developers throw money at, and each developer can easily think of multiple processes that would happily through hundreds or thousands of dollars at if those processes could be automated.
However, it is hard to build software that developers will pay for.
I.e., the demand is there and it is strong, but the products that meet that demand are generally Real Engineering Problems.
A) Self-funding a startup has required me to become quite frugal
B) Giving money to competitors is almost always a mistake
Unfortunately that's the way things go. I would like to be able to afford more, but so would everyone else.
While I agree with you, I also think that technical fields promote negative assessments more than average.
An article a while back pointed out the difference with interviewing: a technical interviewer thinks about starting from some high total of points and subtracting--a management interviewer thinks about starting from some low number of points and adding.
It makes a very different experience.
Note I'm not saying to downplay ALL negative comments, I'm suggesting to downplay negative comments by the users that always write and upvote negative comments.
What the writer was really writing about, though, was that there is little acknowledgment of the effort that went into something, even if in the end it's not for you. Someone wrote a Python interpreter in JavaScript, and in that there is skill, even if overall you reject the effect. What the writer may be asking for is the attitude of a coach: "That was a fast throw, kid, now next time just see if you can aim it more over the plate." That is a legitimate want, and I think the forum would be better if there were more of it. But again, this isn't a deficiency endemic to developers, it's endemic to People on the Internet.
Key takeaway: seeking encouragement from anonymous or semianonymous people on the internet could be harmful.