Thanks for sharing your thoughts Michael, it is also something that has been bothering me for a while and not only in programming, also in other technical domains like electronics.
In my opinion, the reason why programming (or technical design in general) couldn't follow the wiki world is because it has some structural differences that require a different approach. To start with, there is the problem of integration, where code solutions are usually part of a larger system and they cannot be isolated or combined with others blocks as easily as you would combine text fragments like in Wikipedia. I'm sure that all those 10 open file examples have some particularities about the operative system, method, supporting libraries, etc.
The part of scavenging and gluing will be always there unless you follow the approach used in hardware design (wp: semiconductor intellectual property core).
Since that kind of modularity trend is hard to set up at large scale other than what is already stablished, it would be more practical to focus on what can be improved more easily, which is the scavenging. Instead of copying code fragments, it would be better to point to the fragment in the source code project itself, while at the same time providing the semantic tags necessary for describing that fragment. This can be done (more or less) with current existing semantic annotation technology (see thepund.it and Dbpedia Spotlight).
If this has not been done before it is maybe because semantic tools are now in the transition from "adaptation of an emerging technology" into "social appropriation of that technology". For the wiki concept it took 6 years for it to be transformed into wikipedia, more or less the same amount of years between SMW and Wikidata. Semantic annotation of code will eventually happen, how fast it will depend on interest in such a tool and the success of the supporting technologies.
Micru
I have been pondering this for some time, and I would like some feedback. I figure there are many programmers on this list, but I think others might find it interesting as well.Are you satisfied with our progress in increasing software sophistication as compared to, say, increasing the size of datacenters? Personally, I think there is still too much "reinventing the wheel" going on, and the best way to get to software that is complex enough to do things like high-fidelity simulations of virtual worlds is to essentially crowd-source the translation of Wikipedia into code. The existing structure of the Wikipedia articles would serve as a scaffold for a large, consistently designed, open-source software library. Then, whether I was making software for weather prediction and I needed code to slowly simulate physically accurate clouds or I was making a game and I needed code to quickly draw stylized clouds I could just go to the article for clouds, click on C++ (or whatever programming language is appropriate) and then find some useful chunks of code. Every article could link to useful algorithms, data structures, and interface designs that are relevant to the subject of the article. You could also find data-centric programs too. Like, maybe a JavaScript weather statistics browser and visualizer that accesses Wikidata. The big advantage would be that constraining the design of the library to the structure of Wikipedia would handle the encapsulation and modularity aspects of the software engineering so that the components could improve independently. Creating a simulation or visualization where you zoom in from a whole cloud to see its constituent microscopic particles is certainly doable right now, but it would be a lot easier with a function library like this.If you look at the existing Wikicode and Rosetta Code the code samples are small and isolated. They will show, for example, how to open a file in 10 different languages. However, the search engines already do a great job of helping us find those types of code samples across blog posts of people who have had to do that specific task before. However, a problem that I run into frequently that the search engines don't help me solve is if I read a nanoelectronics paper and I want to do a simulation of the physical system they describe I often have to go to the websites of several different professors and do a fair bit of manual work to assemble their different programs into a pipeline, and then the result of my hacking is not easy to expand to new scenarios. We've made enough progress on Wikipedia that I can often just click on a couple of articles to get an understanding of the paper, but if I want to experiment with the ideas in a software context I have to do a lot of scavenging and gluing.I'm not yet convinced that this could work. Maybe Wikipedia works so well because the internet reached a point where there was so much redundant knowledge listed in many places that there was immense social and economic pressure to utilize knowledgeable people to summarize it in a free encyclopedia. Maybe the total amount of software that has been written is still too small, there are still too few programmers, and it's still too difficult compared to writing natural languages for the crowdsourcing dynamics to work. There have been a lot of successful open-source software projects of course, but most of them are focused on creating software for a specific task instead of library components that cover all of the knowledge in the encyclopedia.
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