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How Mainstream Can Code Scavenging Go?
The time-honored tradition of code scavanging has long been a way for new programmers to "break in" to a new language or task that they may not want to build from the ground up. The re-use of old code, cleaned up and tweaked to a new purpose can help developers learn many useful skills and accomplish tasks quickly, especially for small tasks that aren't of vital importance. One blogger wondered if this process could be formalized and tools could be built to help foster and enable code scavanging on a mass level. Is this a viable option, or are there just too many things to consider?
That's a great knee-jerk reaction. Without understanding the motivation behind the article, you assume that code scavenging means stealing other people's code. What they're really talking about is (legitimately) re-visiting code that you or other people have written, and then picking and modularizing bite-sized chunks. In other words, you would design a large program (mark I) and then go back and pick out useful parts, clean/debug them and have working modules (mark II) for the next project.
Also, for people who haven't read TFA, it's 9 short paragraphs long and barely an article. They talk about a "formal approach to code scavenging" without even coming close to explaining what exactly that MEANS.
An old-timer with old-timey ideas.
Some people are already doing this, such as koders, code fetch, codase, and snippets. Talk to them for formalizing as I'm sure they have some good input.
Agreed. Reading TFS, I thought it was going to be yet another "we can make programming like Lego!" thing. (Which it ain't, and probably never will be. Bonus reference: "Lego" is mentioned in the second paragraph of this article about Steve Jobs/NeXT/WebObjects from Wired. God bless Wired and their eternally fucked-up CMS that can't serve images for any story in the archive and, this week, shows the actual HTML code that should be formatting the Question-and-Answer portion of the article.)
Reading TFA, I really don't know much more than I did before. This is the best I could come up with:
So, code scavenging is... um, re-use? Can anyone make better sense of that than I can?
:-)
"In other words, they 'scavenge' the good bits and tweak them to a new purpose."
Um, no. You scavenge the pieces you need, not necessarily the good bits. Have you ever been looking for some code to do parse phone numbers, and while looking at source, said "Hey! This looks like a great way to compare two lists!" Probably not. You're only looking for formatting code, so that's all you see, so that's all you get. Looking at source is not like looking at produce at the food store, where you can walk by the tomatoes and they catch your eye because they're perfectly ripe and really, really nice-looking.
Rather than searching Google, I think every good programmer should take the time to create a really good library. I don't mean take the time writing great code, I mean take the time to organize it into a proper library: make one, clean, well-commented version; put things into variables, ($tableName in queries instead of the actual table name, etc.) and pull code from that when you need it, rather than just copying-and-pasting from the last place you remember using it and then changing all the variable names, table names, etc.
I plan to make mine Real Soon Now.
>> So, how quickly would you run afoul of Intellectual Property laws doing this?
> That's a great knee-jerk reaction.
No, that's just the first thing that popped into his head. (Pardon me if I'm putting words in your mouth, Mr. Gambit.) With that one sentence, he did not say (or imply) "The only people who would use this are thieves." He just put out that question for people to discuss. That topic came up here just a couple days ago. I highly recommend reading that discussion. There are some very good points; among them, that if you publish something with no licensing info, it is copyrighted to you by default. (In the US at least,
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
That article used a lot of words to say absolutely nothing. But it got me thinking... perhaps we could group related snippets of code into units called "libraries", and then we could easily use those libraries to perform common tasks?
Code is basically an algorithm that solves a computational problem. So yes, you can cut and paste algorithms. If you want your application to be maintainable, however, you also have to solve the larger architectural problems, which is something you DON'T get when you cut and paste code.
It is one of the most misunderstood concepts about programming. A programmer fresh out of college knows how to write algorithms really well, but has no idea that there are architectural and design land mines waiting for them just down the development road.
Too many development shops will get an app "working" and think that is all there is to development, because no one has the depth of experience to look a year down the road and see that they will need to rewrite the entire app from scratch in order to make the simplest of changes.
I'm sorry, but if your program is not extensible nor maintainable then you really haven't "succeeded" at anything. You've simply fooled yourself into thinking the process is simpler than it is while screwing your clients out of their development dollars.
It leaves us only "the". Which is an article. Liar.