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Code Scent

UPDATE: git blame does this!

One day, you find yourself happily hacking away at some code you checked out from one of your collaborative coding projects and BAM!, you hit a gnarly bit of one-line wizardry that completely blows your mind. While it may read like English and be as concise as an abridged Cliff Notes, the functionality you need to modify is crystallized somewhere between the continuations and inline DSL definitions.

Who wrote this?

The solution to this would be what I call Code Scent (as opposed to Code Smell). With Code Scent, you’d be able to see code history on a line-by-line or better granularity. Imagine, if you will, selecting a menu option and getting a highlighting scheme that told you who touched which piece of code most recently:

Stolen from Moonedit. Not the most complex code, but you get the idea…

Posted in Technology.

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