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by paulmd 3933 days ago
That's smart. Programmers do a lot of searching for examples, there was a recent Google study on the topic. [1]

One of my personal favorites lately has been bropages [2] - it's a crowdsourced set of usage examples for Unix command-line tools. Instead of wading through fifty pages of obtuse manpages or googling for usage, you just use "bro [command]" and you get some working examples.

[1] https://research.google.com/pubs/pub43835.html

[2] http://bropages.org/

4 comments

I have always been a huge fan of http://Readme.io I wish StackOverflow would integrate with some of these existing platforms instead of creating a new one. One of the biggest problems I have with documentation is fragmentation across platforms. I fear StackOverflow adding another platform will add to the fragmentation problem.
As always, there's an XKCD about it :)

https://xkcd.com/927/

There's also "howdoi," [0] which searches stack overflow. For example:

$ howdoi turn dictionary into json python

>>> json.dumps(your_data, ensure_ascii=False)

[0] https://github.com/gleitz/howdoi

+1 for bro, it's super handy. I'm not affiliated with it but I use it all the time.
http://sourcegraph.com/ is doing something similar.