- rr, the time-travelling debugger[0]
- intellij, or any good ide. seriously, we underappreciate everything these tools do and can do for us.
Ask HN: Which tools have made you a much better programmer?
11–20 of 519 posts
Re: Ask HN: Which tools have made you a much better programmer?
#12- Regex. I don't think anyone's a true developer until they've mastered using regex where globbing would be used. Using regex for globbing is an excellent place to start learning.
- Unit testing. No true developer can call themselves such until they can programmatically verify that their code works to some explicit specification.
There's tons of other things that are bonus points. But I wouldn't call anyone a true developer until they understand and use both of those.
Re: Ask HN: Which tools have made you a much better programmer?
#13That would easily be using an integrated REPL.
The more integrated it is (with your IDE/editor) the better the experience and productivity boost.
And the difference is quite large. When you are working with a language that has first class REPL support you start to
- 'get' why Emacs exists
- become faster at writing code in general
- write much more experimental and open
- become more motivated in testing smaller assumptions and asking questions about your or other peoples code
With "first class support" there are three dimensions:
(1) The REPL and the editor/IDE have to be understand each other well.
(2) The language itself has to be malleable and (de-)compose well in terms of syntax and idioms.
(3) many things in the language are first class expressions or in other words: there is a high degree of tangibility in the language constructs.
Most dynamic languages have workable/decent support for REPL driven development so it is always worth testing out.
You find excellent support in: Clojure (and of course other Lisps) and Julia from my experience.
Re: Ask HN: Which tools have made you a much better programmer?
#14If you can call them a tool, tests would be close to the top of my list. One of the most important metrics for productivity is how quickly you can get feedback if something you did worked. A fast test suite is great for that.
Re: Ask HN: Which tools have made you a much better programmer?
#15Shell, awk, sed and textutils. They teach that programming is everywhere.
I have trouble understanding professional challenges of people that never had a chance to learn those. Like accountants struggling to merge tables or proposal writers painfully tuning document layouts.
Re: Ask HN: Which tools have made you a much better programmer?
#16Git and grep!
Re: Ask HN: Which tools have made you a much better programmer?
#17Perl. CLI one-liners or small one-off scripts.
You can do so much automation and data munging so quickly with it that it really makes you feel like you have superpowers.
Re: Ask HN: Which tools have made you a much better programmer?
#18Read code. Every code. All the codes. You are striving to learn strategies for organizing abstraction. Tools are great but your thinking will move faster with a larger vocabulary for organization.
Re: Ask HN: Which tools have made you a much better programmer?
#19Emacs. Specifically Doom Emacs.
Re: Ask HN: Which tools have made you a much better programmer?
#20MacBook Pro.
After years of dealing with a Windows workstation, I went into credit card debt to purchase a quality laptop computer for my development needs.
I have had the same one for 6 years and found little reason to buy a new MBP.