The Best Mac OS X Software Tools

An anonymous reader writes "Mac advocate John C. Welch weighs in with his list of the top 20 Mac OS X products (except Welch manages to list 22). The collection of software tools ranges from the obvious, such as Boot Camp, to the obscure but perhaps more useful — little-known apps like Peter Borg's Lingon, for creating launchd configuration files. What's on your personal list of indispensable Mac productivity aids and programming tools? Also, do you think Welch gives too much air time to built-in OS X tools at the expense of third-party products such as NetworkLocation?"

Re:The bit i like

[1729]

"...any language that still requires typing shows the essential failure of the computer industry to pry programming out of the hands of geeks."

I couldn't agree more. I definitely remember the idea being bandied round a few years back of high level drag and drop programming for the masses. We have Labview which does that for automated instrumentation control and analysis, is it really so hard to make a high level programming language in the same mould?

The point is: untyped languages are dangerous! They disguise programming errors. That's the reason why Fortran added "implicit none", and subsequent languages have enforced stronger and stronger typing. Any language for real programming (writing an OS, controlling a car or an airplane or a spacecraft or a radiation machine, running a communications network, etc.) NEEDS to be strongly typed, so that simple typos are rejected by the compiler instead of resulting in serious (fatal!) failures. If you're just automated the workflow on your PC, an untyped language might do the trick. But the computing industry has not failed "to pry programming out of the hands of geeks": real, serious programming is hard, and no amount of drag-and-drop or syntactic sugar or weak typing can change that.