The Internet is my snippets database
Like everyone who codes for a living I will lift a snippet of code from a website. Usually it’s very generic code — as most code is — and I never give it a second thought. There are only so many ways to iterate an object. A good portion of my Internet code searching is to look for code I need not because I don’t know how to do it from scratch but because I don’t want to have to figure out how to do it from scratch in yet a new language.
Although there is no reason for most programmers to ever write a sort since sorting is built in to everything these days, a sort would be a good example. Back in the day a programmer would find him or herself needing to sort things all the time and you could not make a decent living typing out a brand spanking new quicksort every time you needed one. So you figured out how to write any particular sort only once per language and saved the code for later reuse.
A more modern example would be something like this:
defaultHandler=function(defaults,params) {
var i;
for (i in params) {
defaults[i]=params[i];
}
return defaults;
}
This powerful little bit of Javascript can be dropped anywhere you need a list of default parameters to be merged with a list of user submitted settings. If you are being efficient about your work you are not going to re-type that code every time you use it; you are going to cut and paste it.
So, like many older professional coders, I have a database with reusable code snippets that I have built up over the course of more than two decades in the business. I have snippets for every sort algorithm you can name: the quicksort, heap sort, bubble sort, merge sort, selection sort, insertion sort ; name and address validators/formatters; date/timezone transformations; list processing; form validation; dynamic tables; and cool tricks. When I need to do something which I have done already a dozen times I simply copy and paste from my vast snippets database, never wasting time re-writing the same code more than once.
That was then; this is now. The problem is that I have all these snippets archived in @formula language, LotusScript, VB, and a bit of Javascript whereas today I need PHP, Perl, Java, and advanced Javascript frameworks like jQuery. I could find the code in my snippets database that does the same thing and then port it over to the new language but why do that when almost any code snippet can be found in under a minute with a deft Google search? I haven’t even used my snippets database in half a decade. The Internet is now my snippets database. I found the above Javascript snippet here, for example, while looking for some sample JavaScript to pass different object types as function parameters.
I haven’t carried a technical reference book to work in almost ten years. I don’t even use them at home anymore. The Internet is now my technical reference library.
