Questions about development tools and other tools that are useful especially to programmers.
Questions tagged [tools]
114 questions
301
votes
20 answers
What does SVN do better than Git?
No question that the majority of debates over programmer tools distill to either personal choice (by the user) or design emphasis, that is, optimizing design according to particular uses cases (by the tool builder). Text editors are probably the…
doug
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93
votes
11 answers
git for personal (one-man) projects. Overkill?
I know, and use, two version control systems: Subversion and git. Subversion, as of now, gets used for personal projects where I am the only developer and git gets used for open source projects and projects where I believe others will also work on…
Anto
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80
votes
20 answers
Is a company order to switch to a certain IDE a red flag?
I recently joined a rapidly growing startup. In the past 3 months the development team has grown from 4 to 12. Until now they were very laissez-faire about what developers used to do their work. In fact one of the things I initially found…
Justin Alexander
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52
votes
13 answers
Should a software developer get a yearly equipment budget?
I am looking at a new position with a new company. I have talked to some people in the past (in general, not at this company) that they had been given a yearly budget to buy new computer stuff to keep up to date.
Now why I feel this question is…
CrazyDart
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39
votes
8 answers
Are there tools to determine code similarity?
I'm not talking about a diff tool. I'm really looking to see if a project contains code that may have been "refactored" from another project. It would be likely that function names, variable names and whatnot would be changed. Conditionals might…
siljoy
39
votes
6 answers
Git-friendly spreadsheet format?
We're trying to move our project documentation process from Google Documents to a set of self-hosted Git repositories.
Text documents are Git-friendly enough, since we usually do not need any fancy formatting, we'll just convert everything to, say,…
Alexander Gladysh
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35
votes
32 answers
Most underestimated programming tool
We have many great tools which helps a lot when programming, such as good programmers text editors, IDEs, debuggers, version control systems etc. Some of the tools are more or less "must have" tools for getting the job done (e.g. compilers).
There…
Anto
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33
votes
4 answers
Why does F# have an interactive mode but not C#?
F# comes out of the box with an interactive REPL. C# has nothing of the sort and is in fact kinda difficult to play around without setting up a full project (though LINQpad works and its also possible to do via powershell).
Is there something…
George Mauer
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28
votes
28 answers
Does over-reliance on tools imply that you are lazy?
I started programming in C++ at uni and loved it. In the next term we changed to VB6 and I hated it.
I could not tell what was going on, you drag a button to a form and the ide writes the code for you.
While I hated the way VB functioned I cannot…
Skeith
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24
votes
7 answers
When should we stop work and make tool?
As a software engineer, we are always eager to get effective tools to boost our productivity.
And in our daily work, we are often unsatisfactory with the existing tools and would like to have better ways such as better GDB script config, Vim script…
xiao
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22
votes
10 answers
Good resources and tools for modern, heavy JavaScript development?
I am interested in doing some projects that involve heavy use of JavaScript. Namely HTML5 based canvas games, potentially using node.js as well. I am interested in learning modern best practices, tools and resources for JavaScript.
JavaScript is…
Matt Greer
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20
votes
7 answers
In a legacy codebase, how do I quickly find out what is being used and what isn't?
I've been asked to evaluate what appears to be a substantial legacy codebase, as a precursor to taking a contract maintaining that codebase.
This isn't the first time I've been in this situation. In the present instance, the code is for a reasonably…
Engineer
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18
votes
21 answers
How do you remember where in your code you want to continue next time?
When you interrupt the work on some code (be it because you have to work on something else or go on vacation or simply because it is the end of the day), once you close that Visual Studio project, what is your preferred way to remember what you want…
bitbonk
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18
votes
8 answers
What would you consider best practice workflow tools for web application (PHP) development?
I'm really hoping somebody with more experience can edit the question as per my examples of answers:
using version control
test driven development
debugging code (xdebug for php)
use of UML diagrams
use of OOP for maintainable, reusable code
use of…
Damien Roche
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15
votes
6 answers
Can you make a build in one step?
From the joel test:
Can you make a build in one step?
I've got to say I can't. I'm currently working on a web app that has a spreadsheet list of items that must be carried out in order to deploy. So my question is how can I automate this? Does…
billy.bob
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