The Basic Toolbox for computer science students.

The Basic Toolbox

This post is aimed at computer science students.

In the software engineering course I’m teaching this spring, I often find myself saying things like “you need to know a scripting language” or “everyone should be able to run a code coverage tool.” Finally, the other day, a student stopped me and asked for the whole list. In other words, what — in my opinion — is the collection of tools that someone graduating with a CS degree should know how to use. Of course I couldn’t answer this on the spot but I’ve been thinking about it since then. The basic idea is that for most any common situation, you should have a decent tool at hand and be able to start solving problems with it without too much fumbling around. (Keep in mind that this is a wish list for self-study: I doubt that any CS program teaches all of these. Also, I didn’t have all of these tool skills when I got my undergraduate CS degree, though I did by the time I got a PhD.)

A version control system: Git is the obvious choice; the main thing you should have is a basic Github-centric workflow including pull requests, remotes, dealing with merge conflicts, etc.

A text editor: We all end up using different editors from time to time, but we should each have a solid default choice that does a good job with most editing tasks. It should highlight and indent any common programming language, integrate with a spellchecker, easily load gigantic files, have nice regex-based search and replace, etc. There are plenty of choices, many CS people migrate to vim or emacs.

A graphing program: I routinely use gnuplot, graphviz, and Powerpoint to make figures. Lots of people like matplotlib.

A presentation tool: Powerpoint, Keynote, Google Slides, something LaTeX based, etc.

An interactive debugger for native executables: LLDB, GDB, something IDE-based.

A generic build system: Make, CMake, etc.

A scripting language: This is for low-grade automation, quick and dirty data analysis tasks, etc. Python and JavaScript would seem like natural choices. Around 20 years ago I was an intern at a networking company and my supervisor popped out of a meeting with some data concerning switch errors, and asked me to do some analysis to locate the underlying pattern. I wasn’t sure how; he handed me a Perl book and I was able to get the job done before the meeting ended.

A shell language: This is probably bash or PowerShell, but there are plenty of other choices. There’s some overlap with scripting languages but I think there are two distinct niches here: a shell language is for scripting a smallish number of commands, doing a bit of error checking, and perhaps looping or interacting with the user slightly This sort of job is a bit too cumbersome in Python, Perl, or JavaScript.

A systems language: This is for creating servers, daemons, and other code that wants to go fast, use little memory, have few dependencies, and interact tightly with the OS. C or C++ would be the obvious choices, but Rust and Go may be fine too.

A workhorse language: This is your default programming language for most tasks, it should have a huge collection of high-quality libraries, be pretty fast, run on all common platforms, have a great tool ecosystem, etc. Racket, Java, Scala, OCaml, C#, Swift, or Haskell would be great — even C++ would work.

A pocket calculator: This is your go-to REPL for basic arithmetic and conversions between number representations, it should be near-instantaneous to get answers. For reasons I no longer remember, I use gdb for this — typically multiple times in any work day. Old standbys like bc and dc also seem like bad choices. I’m curious what other people do here.

Tools for Programming Languages

There’s no reason these days to use a language that doesn’t have a good tool ecosystem. For any given language you should know how to use its interactive debugger, static and dynamic bug-finding tools, a profiler, a code coverage tool, a build system, a package manager, and perhaps a random test-case generator.

Secondary Tools

There are a lot of other tools that could have gone into my basic toolbox, such as a data analysis tool, a browser language, a cloud-based testing service, a statistics language, a typesetting system, a spreadsheet, a database, and a GUI builder/toolkit. I don’t consider these as fundamental; of course, your mileage may vary.