

Ask HN: Would you be inclined to share that moment of genius - khangtoh

I know many hackers here have experienced the moment when they are deep into hacking and in the middle of it wrote a block of code that they felt was just pure genius.<p>At that moment, tears rolled and cries of joy go on in the background, and after the celebratory moment is over, you go back into hacking.<p>But wait a minute, at that moment, did you had the urge to share your masterpiece, your creation, with hackers around the world? What if you could?<p>I know, there's pastie and we all love it. But pastie is unsociable. Hacker's are social beings, we love "social networks", so what I'm proposing is a social network pasties. A twitter for pastie, you follow your favorite hackers. You share code, you optimize code, you do pair programming ( the pastie way ).<p>Forget any web-based input methods. The way you share your code is through a command line program/script.( or any good methods that the community can come up with )<p>Does this sound fun to you? Want to get involved? Vote up if you think this is a good idea. Drop a comment if you got ideas or feedback to share!<p>Email me at hacksignal@gmail.com
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mechanical_fish
I'm not a god of hacking by any means, so perhaps I've just rarely experienced
true code-block Nirvana. But, in my experience, the beauty of software doesn't
often arise from isolated, context-free blocks of code, just as it's hard to
appreciate a great novel by cutting-and-pasting individual sentences and
paragraphs.

The authors of programming books struggle with this problem all the time. A
lot of what they have to say only makes sense in the context of projects that
are longer than what a book can contain. They can't provide convincing real-
world examples, so they are forced to rely on toy examples, which often fail
to get the point across.

The pure-genius moments that I respect are the ones where the code blocks
themselves are the most boring. When I first encountered (e.g.) jQuery, I
realized I was in the presence of true genius. But I find that jQuery code is
not very exciting reading, in and of itself. The typical line of jQuery is
straightforward and transparent: It pretty much describes exactly what is
going on, using idioms that you recognize from other languages (like CSS). The
charm of well-written jQuery is that the individual statements are so
straightforward that you can _skim_ them -- you can look right past them and
concentrate on the big picture, which is where all the important stuff is
happening.

It's the assembly of your blocks of code into a marvelous, comprehensible
large-scale structure that is the challenge of software. And it takes time to
appreciate that. That's why the phrase "deep into hacking" contains the word
_deep_. You have to live inside a problem for a while before its true
structure -- and the elegance of the best solution -- becomes clear.

Of course, maybe all that I'm saying is that I'm not the intended audience for
your proposed project. :) Other people, working on other tasks or with
different languages or styles, might find it very useful!

~~~
khangtoh
"But, in my experience, the beauty of software doesn't often arise from
isolated, context-free blocks of code, just as it's hard to appreciate a great
novel by cutting-and-pasting individual sentences and paragraphs."

True, I have to agree with you that this applies in certain cases/languages.

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khangtoh
Hoping to hear from everyone about this idea.

