Programming and Software Developer Tools

Programming tools or software development tools are computer programs or applications that software developers and computer programmers use to build, debug, maintain or otherwise support other programs and applications. Here are the list of common software development tools:

• A text editor that's designed specifically for editing source code of computer programs, is called source code editor which is used by programmers to write and to edit source code.
• The number one programming tool is no other than a compiler. It is a computer program or a set of programs that translates source code written in a programming language into object code.
• A debugger is a computer program that's important to programmers because it's used to test or to debug their programs and it will assists them in the detection and correction of errors in computer programs.
• A profiler refers to a tool that's used for program profiling, to investigate the memory allocation profile of an application and to identify code that causes memory problems such as memory leaks and excessive or inefficient garbage collection.
• A graphical user interface (GUI) builder simplifies or make the creation of GUIs easy, by allowing the designing user which is called a GUI designer, to arrange objects of GUI using a drag-and-drop WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) editor.
• A software development kit (also known as SDK or devkit,) is a programming package of software development tools includes one or more application programming interfaces (APIs) and documentation, that allows a computer programmer for the development of applications for a specific platform.
• An integrated development environment (IDE) for desktop, is the best and almost complete tool to develop for desktop computer, because it is a set of programming tools including specific SDK and normally consists of a source code editor, build automation tools and a debugger. Several modern IDEs integrate with intelli-sense (or intelligent sense) coding features, which attempts to speed up the process of writing source code by reduction in misunderstandings, typos and other mistakes that programmers commonly make.
• Build automation software is a tool used for scripting or automating software build processes, such (for example,) as connect to subversion server, update if there's latest version, compile the program, run the test cases, pack the application, commit this build binaries to subversion, install the application in a remote server, restart the server and send an email with the job summary.

And also, a web application or portal that's often visited by computer programmers and developers, can be called as a software developer tool, just like Webmaster Tools for web developers. And here are the list of common software developer portals.

• A human-readable knowledge base such as Microsoft Developer Network (MSDN), is the content of a particular field of knowledge that contains the facts and rules needed to solve problems.
• The documentation of a utility software is a place of documents where you can find the complete information, frequently asked questions (FAQ), instructions, manual, tutorials and references how to use this utility.
• A question and answer (Q&A) site for computer programmers such as Stack Overflow, is a platform where you can ask your questions about programming to get answer by the users.
• A code sharing site such as SourceForge and GitHub, is the place to share code in which you have the rights to study the free or open source code of the software that you get.

There are probably some types of programming tools and software developer tools that are not listed here, but I guess I have listed all the important tools among them. And I'm pretty sure that the tools that are listed above are useful for software development.