He left this one out: plain paper and pencil. lets you do plain text and it out saves your file!

But how do I grep my stack of plain papers?

Seriously, yes I agree, plain old paper and pen is absolutely essential. They say geniuses think on paper.

Big whiteboard also does wonders for holding mental state.

In the office we've got some great big windows running down one wall that we use as scratchspace with special markers. Works a treat.

Was this a class presentation written for a CS 101 undergraduate audience at a community college?

in the same vein as gdb is strace, another lifesaver if you're on almost any nix box

"1. Plain Text"

I'm confused, is there another option?

Unfortunately, yes. Binary InstallShield files continue to be a plague on this green earth, and they need to go away. Major chucks of business logic written in an excel spreadsheet or embedded in somebody's access database... I'm sure it goes on.

Where I work, lots of our big customers want code written in "ladder logic" instead of "structured text". Yes, I'm serious.

No, not strange at all. Plain text is the storage format for that markup language. The number of tools that can work with plain text may be "uncountable", but for something like rich text there's not as many. The idea is that even if the editor you originally used goes away, the format of the file itself will always be readable. If someone needs to open an MS Powerpoint presentation in 30 years, it may not be so easy.

He forgot to mention coffee and a computer. FAIL.