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There might be an opportunity somewhere around this area to combine the versioning, continuous improvement, and dependency management of package repositories wi
by jka 5y ago
There might be an opportunity somewhere around this area to combine the versioning, continuous improvement, and dependency management of package repositories with the Q&A format of StackOverflow.
Something like "cherry pick this answer, with attribution, and notifications when flaws and/or improvements are found".
Maybe that's a terrible idea (there's definitely risk involved, and the potential to spread and create bad software), but equally I don't know why it would be significantly worse than unattributed code snippets and trends towards single-function libraries.
- fennecfoxen 5y agoNodeJS did something a lot like this by having packages that are just short snippets, but half the ecosystem flipped out when someone messed up `leftpad`.
- fastball 5y agoWell that and because having 20,000 packages in your project is a PITA in various ways. Mostly but not entirely because NPM handled things poorly in various ways.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- DylanSp 5y agoNot sure if it's quite what you had in mind, but SO is starting to address the issue of updating old answers with the Outdated Answers Project: https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/405302/introducing-outdated-answers-project https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/405302/introducing-...
- jka 5y agoVery relevant, thank you!
- Smithalicious 5y agoSadly updates don't just remove bugs, but sometimes also add them. Silently adding a bug to previously working code is a lot more bad than silently fixing a bug you didn't know you had is good, so I wouldn't want to have a load of self-updating code snippets in my codebase.