It's really weird to hear someone say that - because I grew up in the 80s with a computer that had a commercial-quality (for the time) assembler built-in! Sure you could buy Pascal or Lisp too, but out-of-the-box you got the same tools the pros were using, and all the documentation with it too.
Well truthfully my first computer (an Acorn BBC) had a BASIC interpreter built in, I think you could also do some assembler out of the box although I never tried that at the time.
Even my first DOS PC had QBasic pre installed but it had no ability to make .EXE files which was what you needed to be able to do if you wanted to submit your software to shareware libraries.
It seems at that point that Microsoft wanted a devide between "toy" programming languages like QBASIC and "professional" ones like Visual Basic which cost money.
If you wanted to create "proper" windows software you needed to fork out some cash.
Contrast that with now where you can download Visual Studio Express along with all documentation, compilers etc for free as well as a whole load of open source languages and libraries.
I now make my living as a programmer and I use almost no commercial tools at all, I doubt many people were doing such a thing in ~1993
