[keepamovin]

Clearly we need something in between the fauxpen-access of journals and the wilde west of the blogosphere, probably. Why wouldn't the faded ox publish in a paper? Idk, but I guess we need things similar to those circulars that British royal society members used to send to each other...except not reserved for a club. The web should be a natural at this. But it's either centralized -> monetized -> corrupted, or decentralized -> unindexed/niche -> forgotten fringe. What can come between?

[Nition]

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.

[fabianholzer]

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...

[Voklen]

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

[nyargh]

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.

[oneeyedpigeon]

> 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?

[__patchbit__]

There is https://grokipedia.com which encourages you to suggest an article and you may submit improvements to an existing article.

[lobsterthief]

This is _not_ at all the same thing. Grok just ripped off Wikipedia as its base and then applied a biased spin to it. Check out the entry on Grok owner Elon Musk; it praises his accomplishments and completely omits or downplays most of his better-known controversies.

[latexr]

And everything is “fact checked” by the Grok LLM. Which… Yeah…

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grok_(chatbot)#Controversies

[__patchbit__]

The Grok information source is more reliable than Wikipedia.

Objectively and incrementally improving. The leadership behind Grok is human rated safe rocket science quality.

Whereas Wikipedia is a fugly dumpsterdive.

[bambax]

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.

[progval]

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

[lelanthran]

> Clearly we need something in between the fauxpen-access of journals and the wilde west of the blogosphere, probably.

I think GP's min-distance solution would work well as an arxiv paper that is never submitted for publication.

A curated list of never-published papers, with comments by users, makes sense in this context. Not sure that arxiv itself is a good place, but something close to it in design, with user comments and response-papers could be workable.

Something like RFC, but with rich content (not plain-text) and focused on things like GP published (code techniques, tricks, etc).

Could even call it "circulars on computer programming" or "circulars on software engineering", etc.

PS. I ran an experiment some time back, putting something on arxiv instead of github, and had to field a few comments about "this is not novel enough to be a paper" and my responses were "this is not a publishable paper, and I don't intend to submit it anywhere". IOW, this is not a new or unique problem.

(See the thread here - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44290315)

[knolan]

There is the Journal of Open Source Software perhaps:

https://joss.theoj.org/