Programming Tools You've Used?

crazy_speeder asks: "I'm looking for programming tools for the whole development cycle, including documentation. The project I'm working on will use C++ and Java. What has been your experience using tools like C++ Builder, Netbeans, Eclipse, JBuilder, Doxygen, ClearQuest, Rational Rose, g++, and any compiler, debugger, or IDE that you may have used. I need tools that will handle auto documentation, unit testing, design, file editing, and the like. As far as platform goes, Linux is the target OS while Linux or Solaris will be the host OS."

Comments

Re:Learn to write your own documentation.

[Samrobb]

...learning to write your own, comprehensive, thought-out documentation is a very valuable skill that most don't have.

It sounds like you've never used one of these tools. There are multiple types of documentation: design, end user, man pages, etc. Doxygen and other auto documentation tools help developers deal with a single, specific documentation problem - how to keep developer documentation in sync with the code. These tools make it easy to develop documentation on API usage, show the actual (not designed) interrelations between internal components, and do all the other documentation work that generally makes it much easier for a new developer to come up to speed in a particular area on a project.

That's it, really. The purpose is to automate an otherwise tedious task, and consolidate documentation in one location with the idea that having a single source for code and code documentaion will help prevent errors from creeping in. There's nothing character-building about hand-editing these sorts of docs, any more than it would be character building to execute all your build commands one by one on the command line instead of using a makefile.

Somewhere along the line, you will find yourself having to hack out code in a text editor, or use a less-than-top-of-the-line development environment, at which point you will have to fall back on your own skills and not those of an auto-documentation program.

Most of these auto-documentation tools work quite well on the command line, apart from any sort of IDE. A good number of them can produce decent documentation even if the source code wasn't written with the documentation tool in mind. These tools aren't complex, fancy whiz-bang sorts of things; they do a pretty straightforward job, do it well, and often are no more difficult to use than any other single-purpose tool. Whats more, most of them (Doxygen in particular) allow you to create links into your "real" (higher-level) documentation, so you can do interesting things like include pointers in the source code back to the features and requirements that it was written to support (and vice-versa).

Re:vim

[BinLadenMyHero]

May sound funny, but he is right.
With syntax highlighting for all languages know to man, text folding for structured overview of your large files, directory browsing, great integration with unix tools and great extensability, Vim is the only tool besided gcc and ocasionally gdb I've used for a long time. Even when I was programming in Java in a Windows machine two years ago.
Oh, and it's an excelent text editor too. =)

VI VI VI, the editor of the beast!