I am not saying that this would not be generally useful. In our case we're a specialised shop, without many short-listable applicants (we only ask code from candidates going forward to an interview), so it's no big deal for the tech lead to cast an eye over submitted code samples.

Not looking for perfection here - just to give you a basic example, I had a candidate submit code that did not have a single comment in it. I mean even if you wrote the code in the first place with no comments (naughty you), surely you'd stick some in before you sent it to somebody you wanted a job from, eh?

Obviously for the hotshot places that get hundreds of qualified applicants, that's a different story. Still, I think you can tell a lot about somebody's coding personality from looking at their stuff, not sure I'd trust a machine to do it.

http://i.seemikecode.com/

I've heard of others but can't recall the names or what to Google for them. They started around the time Jeff Atwood wrote his FizzBuzz rant, iirc:

http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2007/02/why-cant-programmer...