I wasn't trying to say that $150 is a small amount of money, I was trying to say that in other professions it is normal to spend a significant amount of money on tools, but for some reasons many developers seem to think their tools should be free.

I am not from Italy, so I can't say how much carpenters in Italy spend on their tools, but I know that when we had a carpenter work on our house in Austria, they showed up with a lot more than $150 worth of tools. Just the Hilti drill they had has a list price north of 2000€. $150 might just get you the drill serviced.

They might even pay more for software than the average programmer -- typical CAD software used for construction plans often costs 1000€ or more per seat.

Also, when comparing the salary to the cost of tools you have to consider that the salary is what's left after expenses (such as tools) have been accounted for.

> I don’t know nor care if it’s a reasonable price for a piece of software but if you think it’s a small sum of money you have no idea of what the life of an average person looks like.

It’s a small sum of money for me. It is obviously not a small sum of money for a Bangladeshi beggar or a Peruvian cobbler.

What, exactly, is the point of this complaint? It’s obvious that people are speaking about themselves. Some people in some nations have more money than other people in other nations — that’s the world we live in. We are all already aware of this.

What is useful about bringing this up? Should every discussion of every price of everything in the world have to list how affordable it is in each and every country on earth? Is that your idea of a realistic approach to a discussion?

> It’s a small sum of money for me. It is obviously not a small sum of money for a Bangladeshi beggar or a Peruvian cobbler.

The parent just explained why in Italy this would not be a small sum of money, and you’re now equating them with a beggar.

The whole point we’re trying to make is that it’s not “Bangladeshi beggars” that cannot afford this, but a large group of the intended target audience.

That can be a fair trade-off they make, but you seem to brush it off as “if you can’t afford $150 for a tool like this, obviously you’re a beggar and definitely not a software dev”, which shows a completely out of touch perspective on salaries, cost of living, exchange rate, etc of a huge portion of the modernized, western world.

“This is obviously not a small amount of money to <extreme example>” obviously does not mean “everybody to whom this is not a small amount of money is equally poor, or has an equal view of its largeness” because there is, very very obviously, a large range of incomes in this world. I shouldn’t even have to say “Italian developers are very obviously to anyone with half a brain not the same as beggars”, and yet, here we are.

I’d suggest you learn to read things charitably, instead of searching for the most unlikely and preposterous meaning you can possibly dream up in order to get mad at a post. You’ll be happier for it.