The numerical software that I work with is written as command line tools. As such, they get their parameters from command line arguments and/or parameter files. Their output is written to files as well. Since one can redirect standard output into a text file, we will only consider files here.
For my work, I use various tools. For every task, some tools are better suited than other. However, a mostly-suited tool that you know is better than the perfect tool that you don't know. Therefore I found it helpful to know at least one representative from various categories well. If one knows a different one from a category, one has a relatively easy time picking up the other ones if needed.
I have now worked on two scientific code bases that are written in C++. One is for classical physics, the other one does quantum field theory. But that is not the point. The point is that there is a lot of code and there are lots of scientist working on that code.
There are a couple of programs that have cell-based notebook interfaces. In this example I will use iPython Notebook (now called Jupyter notebooks). The exact same results can be obtained with Wolfram Mathematica.
Using "doing X [figuratively] kills puppies" as an argument for your case is not helpful. Rather explain why X is considered an anti-pattern and in what cases it may be still permissible. This gives the other person a possibility to reason about the guidance and probably increases the chance that your argument will be accepted.
In principle, deploying PHP is extremely easy. Just log into the FTP account of the hoster, upload your files, done. Before I deploy, I want to create a test environment locally such that I can quickly see what my changes actually do before uploading it.
Whenever I go shopping, I get those thermo-printed paper receipts. In principle, those contain all the information about the products that I bought. At home I have a big pile of paper receipts. Ideally I could extract at least the information from the supermarket receipts and generate a statistic about the products that I have bought. I am not sure how useful that is in practice, it would be at least cool.
I use Xournal a lot for my work. There are two features which I think are missing. Now that on Pentecost break 2016, I finally added both features. This is a fork of Xournal in the hope that these features make it to the upstream eventually.
Es gibt Dinge, die gehören zur Softwareentwicklung einfach dazu. Das ist, dass der Quelltext in einem Versionsverwaltungssystem (am besten git) verwaltet ist und dass das Kompilieren per Buildsystem (CMake oder Ähnlich) geht, der Kompilierprozess also maschinenlesbar aufgeschrieben ist. Ist das nicht der Fall, so können neue Entwickler nicht einfach das Projekt mal kompilieren. Mehr dazu von Jeff Atwood.
Version control is a neat thing when programming, but I sometimes forget which project uses which system. All of my projects use git, some others use SVN, Mercurial or Bazaar. When I work on the command line, I would like to know whether the current directory is version controlled and which system is used.