What is your development setup?

[oneoverphi]

I use Scilab for quickly trying out this or that. Scilab is a free Matlab alternative that is very similar as far as interface and use go. In fact it has a utility for converting Matlab files for its own use, so if you have a store of prized Matlab examples they won't go to waste. It allows me to tweak until I have something I want to commit to C++. The syntax is akin enough to C that it is not much of a problem to take what I've done in Scilab directly to the VST environment with some minor syntactical changes.

I don't have any fancy IDE setup nor do I rely on Juce, or Csound, or any other specialty package for steamlining the development process. I just fire up Programmers Notepad and start working with a general purpose VST template I had written. I use Cygwin with GCC and MinGW DLLwrap to compile from the commandline.

Also I find it useful build up a snippets database for things you know you're going to do again and again. (Like converting parameter values to a custom dB range or simple filters)

[hibrasil]

Nowadays I usually prototype in MaxMSP / Gen, then code up a GUI-less plug-in in C++ with IPlug, or just go straight for C++. Things like the "jucer" app in JUCE, or the python duplication script I made for IPlug mean that making a working plug-in to test an algorithm is a relatively quick process.

[Ichad.c]

I tend to use Maxima (and occasionally Wolfram Alpha) because I like to be different.

+1 for Maxima

[Ken McLaren]

"R".. Thats interesting. I only just found out about R the other day, but it looks pretty cool

[resynthesis]

Most often I use C/C++/Ada95 using existing libraries. However, if there's stuff I'm unsure of or want to play with I tend to use Octave. I have been playing about a bit with pyo and scipy lately and maybe that's the future.

I've used R on a couple of Coursera courses recently and, while it's undoubtedly a powerful system, I find the it horrible to code and always feel a bit "dirty" after using it.