Perhaps this is an effect of learning to program in the 2010s, but paying for a programming language (Java, PHP) sounds crazy to me.

Do people actually do this?

It's not terribly common anymore, but people used to pay for the Coldfusion programming language...well at least a compiler/interpreter for it. Outside of some third-party things like OpenBluedragon and Railo, if you wanted to deploy Coldfusion in any capacity, you had to pay Macromedia/Adobe for a license.

I don't know of any companies that are still using Coldfusion and I haven't had to touch it since 2012 (thank god), but it certainly was a common thing for awhile.

Yes you used to have to pay for your development tools (borland was a big player in the space). Even microsoft tools weren't free

Visual Studio Enterprise is expensive as hell and C# is the king of the enterprise, together with Java which runs on enterprise Oracle App servers

Those are the words a company can use to make me instantly turn down a position. Are you reading directly from the noperonomicon?

Embedded compilers/IDE as well.

LabView is really popular in physical engineering circles and it costs over $5,000 per copy.

MatLab

Did something change with those?

I feel like this narrative is still apples to oranges and the concerns expressed are more about managing the costs all the SaaS products, not having to pay...

Has any of those gotten better at a slower speed than their closed source counterparts?