I wonder if there could be something like a Wikipedia for programming. A bit like what the book Design Patterns did in 1994, collecting everyone's useful solutions, but on a much larger scale. Everyone shares the best strategies and algorithms for everything, and updates them when new ones come about, and we finally stop reinventing the wheel for every new project.

To some extent that was Stack Overflow, and it's also GitHub, and now it's also LLMs, but not quite.

May I suggest "PASTE": Patterns, Algorithms, Solutions, Techniques, and Examples. "Just copy PASTE", they'll say.

Ward Cunningham once, of all places in an Github issue [0], explained how the original C2 Wiki was seeded.

> Perhaps I should explain why wiki worked. > I wrote a program in a weekend and then spent two hours a day for the next five years curating the content it held. For another five years a collection of people did the same work with love for what was there. But that was the end. A third cohort of curators did not appear. Content suffered.

A heroic amount effort of a single person, and later the collective effort of a small group, worked in the mid-90es. I'm skeptical that it will be repeatable 30 years later. Despite this, it would be the type of place, that I'd like to visit on the web. :(

[0] https://github.com/WardCunningham/remodeling/issues/51#issue...

Great idea! https://paste.voklen.com/wiki/Main_Page If people start using it I'll get a proper domain name for it.

An algolwiki is a great idea, but I just wanted to say I got a good chuckle from this, thanks :)

> May I suggest "PASTE": Patterns, Algorithms, Solutions, Techniques, and Examples. "Just copy PASTE", they'll say.

> To some extent that was Stack Overflow

Yup, that was always very much the plan, from the earliest days. Shame it soured a bit, but since the content is all freely reusable, maybe something can be built atop the ashes?

Yes exactly! It would need some publicity of some kind to get started but it's the best solution, certainly? And all of the tools and infrastructure already exist.

There is https://www.wikifunctions.org/