Invaluable Helpers

Programmers have help.

Thousands of tools have been created to make our lives easier when we are organizing, designing, coding, debugging, unit testing, regression testing, and maintaining.

I’m under no illusion that I’m using the best tools imaginable, but I sure as hell rely on a few supporting characters:

• A good editor is invaluable. The Emacs editor (OS?) with org-mode has become invaluable to my programming.

• In the land of C/C++ memory leaks, valgrind is a miracle worker.

• Visual Studio’s debugger and GDB are invaluable in tracking down logical flaws.

• Matlab and Mathematica are great for checking my numbers.

• I’ve yet to find a better design tool than a sheet of paper and a pencil.

• As recent as Friday, I’ve used this little Python echo server to debug send/receive functions in network applications:

import socket
s=socket.socket(socket.AF_INET, socket.SOCK_STREAM)
s.bind(('localhost',12345))
s.listen(5)
while 1:
    c, a = s.accept()
    data = s.recv(1024)
    if data:
        print data
        client.send(data)
    client.close()

• I use Wireshark to see programs talk to each other over network interfaces.

What do you use?

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