Code Cutting Chefs

Have you seen those TV chefs with their own selection of special knives that work just the way they like it? Or maybe you've been to a hairdresser who has their own special set of scissors? Painters with their own mix of paints? A surfboarder with the wax applied in just the right way? You get the idea ...

What about computer programmers? What about your set of knives? Do you have just one tool (e.g., Eclipse) or a whole set (e.g., vi, emacs, perl, sed, awk etc)? Some of these tools help our keystrokes and ability to edit files - but this is just the start. Programming is about a lot more than editing files: feeling the pain, analysing, modelling, designing, testing, optimising, monitoring, refactoring, maintaining, learning, sharing, remembering, sifting, sorting, inventing, cloning, creating, making, deleting, profiling etc.

You need a tool that is intimately tuned into your own process of programming - all the way from pain, problem to solution and back again. Not just the coding bit - I mean the lot. The tool needs to grow with you. You need to constantly sharpen it - introspecting on your own process of programming (what's going through your head?) and automating as much as possible. This is what I'm trying to do with The Goo. Because it's a tool I'm creating for myself I don't expect everyone to like it. There's more than one way to do it (TMTOWTDI). Your set of knives will be necessarily different but I hope I inspire you to start sharpening .... :-)