code-brainstorming

Code Brainstorming

This is a brainstorm for the code microformat. See also examples of code in the wild.

The Problem

There are numerous sites on the Internet that seek to: Teach a programming language, Document a programming language, Collect examples or bits of code for reuse in the general community, or Show off a particularly interesting section of code. Examples are, tutorials, language documentation, programming communities, or just plain old blogs. Each of these sites encapsulates their source code in different fashions and wraps up the metadata in different ways, this makes the source code found around the web largely indigestible by machines.

So by consolidating common practices into a standard format, you a) allow web developers a standard representation of source code online, and b) offer it in a format that is digestible by computers. This more than anything allows for interesting use by users. It would for instance allow users to collect code examples from the web and store them on their local machines in meaningful ways, which in turn allows them to organize and search that new source code repository for examples, classes or snippets that relate to their problem, and further gives them the information necessary to safely use that source code (license, author, language, etc.)