From: Eric Armstrong <Eric.Armstrong@...>
Date: 2006-08-13T12:15:02+09:00
Subject: Re: spread your best code-snippets

John Gabriele wrote:
> 
> ActiveState does this for a number of languages:
> http://aspn.activestate.com/ASPN/Cookbook/
> 
> The keys to making this work really well, I would think, would be:
> 
> 1. Keep the snippets categorized for easy browsing.
> 
That right there is the really hard part! Everything
after that is a piece of cake.

The problem is compounded by the fact that a good
snippet library nests. One snippet will show basic
file reading, another will show a regular expression
pattern, and a third will integrate both of them into
a snippet that does some useful task.

Then there is the synonym issue. Snippets are a great
way to answer the "how do I do that?" question, and
a snippet library is easily searched when you know the
keywords you're looking for.

But when you don't know the keywords in advance, the
library needs a synonym generation mechanism (so they
get included in snippet comments) or a translation
mechanism, so people coming from different languages
will find the different ways Ruby uses to carry out
familiar tasks.

It's one /terrific/ AI project. I would think that a
paper on "how to do it right" would make a great thesis.