On 8/2/06, Christian Neukirchen <chneukirchen / gmail.com> wrote:
> "naPOLeon" <naPOLeon.Polzer / gmx.de> writes:
>
> > I just ran over a nice code-snippet online-database: 'Programming is
> > Hard' at http://programmingishard.com/
> >
> > So let's spread our best Ruby-Code to help the others out there to
> > improve their code.
>
> This is the third kind of snippet site I see today---they all look the
> same.  Wouldn't it be more effective to unify them?

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.

2. Provide a means for users to comment on the snippets (since they
may want to provide corrections or alternatives).

3. Explicitly specify the terms by which all the snippets will be made
available (public domain might make the most sense here).

4. Provide a link to download all snippets in a tar.gz file. (Oooh --
maybe even including the user comments as separate text files... [muah
ha ha ha!])

Might make a great but simple RoR project for some scrappy Rubyist pup!

---John