ProgrammingExamples:About

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I am a frequent user of the c++ forum on daniweb.com (http://www.daniweb.com/forums/forum8.html).

On this forum, at least once a week someone will ask "How do I sort an array?". Rather than a member having to explain how to store the elements, where to find the sort function, etc every time this happens, I recommended that we should simply add an entry to an examples database called "Sorting an array" and spend the few minutes that we would have spent explain it to a single person writing a brief description paragraph and some code that demonstrates a typical use case. This database/wiki of frequently asked questions and answers should provide short code in compilable form.

I recently did this same thing for an open source project I work on (http://www.vtk.org/Wiki/VTK/Examples) and it has reduced the daily work of members on the mailing list enormously. Once the database gets to a reasonable size (which doesn't actually take that long with lots of people helping!), an astonishing number of questions can now be answered in a single line reply - a link to one of these examples. When a question has not been seen before, if someone thinks that it is general enough to be useful in the future, it is added to the database. With 3/4 of a million members, these example databases (with the right overseeing) could quickly turn DaniWeb into not only a forum, but the main internet source of programming knowledge!

Daviddoria 19:15, 23 June 2010 (UTC)