Ask HN: Which tools have made you a much better programmer?

Listening

The way I do it is that I whenever I start working on some functionality and it’s not immediately obvious how to implement it, I open a text file and write down my thoughts as something between stream of consciousness and design document, usually formatted as a multi-level bullet-point list.

I start with what I am trying to achieve and list the different design approaches I can think of, adding advantages and disadvantages of each one as they come to mind. By the time I’ve written down all my thoughts on a design decision, it is often clear to me which approach I favor.

This can be repeated for more and more detailed aspects of the implementation (e.g. “which function should this be added to” or “what to name this function/struct/variable”) until I feel like I can come up with the remaining details as I’m writing the code. If I get stuck somewhere later on, I can always go back and add more details in the text document.

For larger or more important features, this list can be cleaned up and become documentation or perhaps a comment somewhere, but I often find that the writing is a useful tool to get unstuck and to clarify my thoughts even if I end up never reading it again.

Maybe the opposite of many other comments but... macOS. Limited choices and customisations, but less is better. Not having to worry about "stuff" is something that goes easily undervalued.

I started my career programming in Vim on VT100 terminals (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VT100) - yes, I am old.

There was no IDE, auto-complete, visual debugger etc. You really had to think before you typed any code. Even fixing compilation error was a pain - you had to note down the line number and the error, go back and open vim, fix the error, exit vim, re-compile and rinse and repeat. Taught me the paradigm of thinking hard about the problem before starting to code and I think that has helped a lot.

This was still better than the punch-card days I have heard but I personally never had the experience.

regular expressions. Both in programs, and in text editors that support regex, where I eliminate the need to write some small utility program by using regex instead. Combine with sed & awk and it's an incredibly powerful combination.