A significant factor in getting any job done properly is having the right tools. This is true whether you are building a kitchen, fixing your car or developing embedded software. Of course, it is the last of these that I am interested in here. I have been evangelizing on this topic for years (decades!). The problem is that there is a similarity – arguably superficial – between programming an embedded system and programming a desktop computer. The same (kind of) languages are used and software design techniques are fairly universal. However, there are really some major differences … (more…)