Hi, i want to hear from people who earn their living by programming. You have a lot of tools. You have years of experience.
If you could turn back time, what tools should you have used in order to finish faster?
I appreciate honest answer. If you remain silent, i respect your secret. You have spent years of time and effort, i feel that too.
Greetings to the best.
Simple, a compiler, a shell command (or DOS screen) and a text editor!
Don't focus on the tools you use, focus on the job you do with those tools. Too many developers get tied to a specific IDE or a specific environment and find it exceedingly difficult to break out of that. A hammer is only as good as the carpenter who wields it.
For java, eclipse and use plugins as much as possible. be it Tomcat, maven, svn...
All things considered, spanners, pipe bender, blowlamp. I should have become a plumber, less stress more money.
Emacs is my friend for life. So is my paper notepad and the pencil.
I'd wish that I had been better at social engineering - this is the tool that has served me best the last three years.
I think the 'universal IDE' is Eclipse, although I use RubyMine and TextMate for Ruby. It depends of what language you use and what development you do.
I think using emacs/vi with Java might be quite hard, without object inspection, code completion...
For C development without GUI vi/emacs are more than OK.
I wish I had better skills in using vi/emacs and other GUI IDEs, I feel like I craftman without tools.
However I am sure that a universal tool does not exist and will never exist
This falls into the social engineering tools category...
I've been programming for over 20 years now, and I'll never forget what a mentor of mine taught me when I was just starting: If your stuck trying to figure out something for more than 5 minutes, start asking questions.
Of course back then it was in person, asking the lead, or a senior developer a question. Now I google.
I never could understand why some of my peers would spend months trying to figure out something all by themselves w/o even letting other people know what problem they were trying to solve.
Of course asking the question doesn't always get an answer, but at least you'll know if what your trying to figure out is novel.
Another frequent benefit to asking questions: by the time you've explained what your trying to solve, the answer pops into your head!
As far as tools,
App Logging is a frequently overlooked tool, extremely useful.
and debuggers are crucial. Become an expert at all of them (WinDBG, VS)