This can be very useful for people learning new language, for example I'm learning angularjs and javascript, I write a lot of code with them that work but I'm pretty sure they can be improved a lot by a angular/js expert.
How about a feature to open a bounty and pay real money to people who refactor the code, and only the refactoror and initiator can see the code?
Also may I ask which editor do you use in the new question form?
Well..it depends on what you mean by 'support'. There are two modes. You can either make your code runnable or not. In terms of the code being runnable, 32 languages. In terms of pretty syntax highlighting, but just static code....much more than that. If you try to add a question or suggestion, you will see a dropdown list that contains all the languages. I believe it is roughly 90+ languages for static, syntax highlighting.
> This can be very useful for people learning new language, for example I'm learning angularjs and javascript, I write a lot of code with them that work but I'm pretty sure they can be improved a lot by a angular/js expert.
Hrmm...this is a very interesting perspective. I've never quite thought about it from that angle, but you are right.
> How about a feature to open a bounty and pay real money to people who refactor the code, and only the refactoror and initiator can see the code?
So I have thought about implementing the first part, and I probably am going to facilitate this.
The latter part is interesting, I guess the obvious question would be.....why would we want to prevent people from seeing the code? Because the code belongs to a proprietary project or for other privacy reasons? I am not being facetious, just genuinely trying to dig into this issue fully because I have gotten similar feedback about making it private.
So assuming we decide to allow a private feature, I guess the obvious question is...what's private? It would have to be only the refactors, right? Otherwise, no one will know what to refactor and whether or not they want to bother trying.
Taken further still, so let's assume that we can settle on a reason and mechanism to keep it private and allow the refactoror to see it, I would think that it would be in your best interest to have as many people viewing both your original post and the refactored suggestions so you can be sure the refactor that was produced is indeed the best possible refactor for your desired solution.
I can empathize with the need for privacy and keeping some code proprietary, but I guess the real question is, is it a safe assumption to make that the person that does the first refactor does the best job? Or even the person willing to jump through the hoops to see your refactor, does the best job? I would figure the only way to know is by making everything open and open to feedback from the community.
That way, if I submit something to you, someone else can build on my suggestion and we both get credit. You get the best refactor possible, and we both get credit and likely both learn.
That's my initial thinking on this stuff, but I am open to hearing other perspectives for sure.
> Also may I ask which editor do you use in the new question form?
Summernote - http://summernote.org/ - it works beautifully with Bootstrap and Simple Form (if you are using Rails).
> How about a feature to open a bounty and pay real money to people who refactor the code, and only the refactoror and initiator can see the code?
Privacy is the trick bit, I guess you are right there's no way to keep code completely proprietary.
I was thinking from my own experience, I have worked for big companies that have tons of legacy code that were written in subpar standard, sometimes developers were asked to refactor a piece of code written in a technology they are not familiar with. Have a refactor tool like this can serve as a mini contract to outside developers (or QA in some perspective).
Any reasonable sized company will have some rules regarding proprietary information, it's very unlikely they'll allow employee to publish company's code to an open community, so some restrictions need to be applied. However, if you want to focus on open source projects then none of this matters.
How about create a group, and only people with certain privilege can join, for example, a "Java Consultant" group that only people with >1000 reputations can join. On joining this group you also have to agree to extra terms and conditions, ie. not to disclose code you've seen or use it on your own. And when you start a refactor request, you can choose only to publish to this group, and only people in this group can take bounties (or you can choose to label your code with a particular license to prevent reuse).
It would also help if you can provide a feature that the initiator can force the refactor to provide a mini document to explain why the refactored code is better.
Can run the code... but, not the tests, which would make in-place refactors considerably easier.
Clicking Gear for settings doesn't go back to edit window when you're done and you click the Gear again, which is how I first tried to get back to the editor.
No place to set "license" specifically for each piece (and maybe a default in your account settings) making it impossible to take the code and use it without opening Pandora's box.
So little there, and all six days ago... you could grab examples from open source projects and put them in, if you could do that while obeying the license on the code (which comes back to at least showing the license, and maybe also linking to the URL for that piece of code or project).
As this is ultimately "one piece of code with several examples of another piece of code to replace it" despite it being for refactoring, you can imagine it'll be used for "this was a bug, this is the fixed version." Might be useful to provide specific support for that somewhere down the line.
That's definitely something that I would love to implement in the future - if I can find a way to make it viable. This was just v1 to see if there is even a path that makes sense.
>Clicking Gear for settings doesn't go back to edit window when you're done and you click the Gear again, which is how I first tried to get back to the editor.
Yeh, I am using the API for Glot.io -- which provides no way to customize that iFrame. So I am stuck with that functionality for now.
>No place to set "license" specifically for each piece (and maybe a default in your account settings) making it impossible to take the code and use it without opening Pandora's box.
Ohh...this is interesting. Never considered the 'license' bit. Is that really an issue though? You can't add a license on SO, and that doesn't seem to stop people from pasting code snippets.
>So little there, and all six days ago... you could grab examples from open source projects and put them in, if you could do that while obeying the license on the code (which comes back to at least showing the license, and maybe also linking to the URL for that piece of code or project).
I agree fully, and it seems like it should be pretty easy to do from OSS projects, eh? The issue I ran into was identifying what snippets of code really needed to be refactored and why. That's the counter-intuitive bit, in order to be able to explain why something needs refactoring you have to fully understand what it does.
I can most certainly do that for some Ruby code (where most of my experience lies), but once we get into other languages I am kind of outside of my depth (to be frank).
So another alternative is to simply search GH Issues for the term "please refactor me". I tried that too, and most of the immediate stuff I found are usually too old or too basic.
That being said, if you have any suggestions on specific bits of code from OSS projects you have used that you have seen that could be a good candidate please feel free to share them.
I am definitely going to be looking myself too. It's just not as 'slam dunk' as it appears at first thought.
>As this is ultimately "one piece of code with several examples of another piece of code to replace it" despite it being for refactoring, you can imagine it'll be used for "this was a bug, this is the fixed version." Might be useful to provide specific support for that somewhere down the line.
This is very interesting and I would love to hear more about what you are thinking. Do you mean like someone would post a snippet of code that has a bug and ask for the community to fix it? Then the site would track the various iterations and show the final version? If so, that does sound intriguing and is inline with some other ideas I have.
If not, I would love to hear what you meant or just some more thoughts on potential future direction.
That being said, thanks for even taking the time to give me such a thoughtful response. I really appreciate it.
I would love to see what people use it for and then we can kinda pivot from there.
The general purpose is, do you have some code that you think could do with some loving, post it and let's see if we can get the community to refactor it.
If enough people start using it for other things, then I would definitely shift in that direction if that's where the usage is taking me.
Best of luck, I hope it takes off!
My wife suggested the 'plz' and while it wasn't perfect it was much better than the others I thought about...so in the spirit of shipping something, I ran with it :)
I know GH is a huge source of OSS code, but how do I (easily & quickly) find code I can use that could be a good candidate to be refactored?
Ideally, it would be good if the code didn't have too many dependencies or it would be easily understandable so I can explain what the goal is for the refactor.
I tried just searching GH for the phrase "please refactor me", but that turned up a lot of old code and crap...basically.
I would love to be able to go through some of the large OSS projects (Rails, jQuery, any other large ones) and quickly find code that needs to be refactored and preferably have an explanation.
Anyone have any suggestions for how I might be able to do that without actually fully understanding the code snippet I am referencing?
Edit: Hat Tip to pkroll for also confirming that this should be a viable strategy to get content in his comment on this thread.
