The Code Scrapheap

In a recent post Brian Foote talkes about the death of design, and the rise of scrapheap techniques (I'm paraphrasing of course). The scrapheap technique involves scouring a virtual heap of code, and scavanging the parts you need to build something new. Ihe scrap heap in this context is the Internet, and the scouring tool of choice is Google.

Now, this got me thinking. Google has a search tool for searching the web, another called Froogle for searching for products, Blog Search for blogs, Google Print for books, and many others. So where is my "Google Code"? If I am going to dig up the tasty morsels, I will need a tool built specifically for this purpose.

But perhaps this is not something I should wish for. Perhaps a tool like this would promote Software Devolution, and in turn to more mud than I care to wade through. I am in the software maintenance business, so I already get to see more mud than I care for.

Update 11/2/05: Chad Fowler pointed out that a search engine like this already exists, http://www.koders.com. I like the fact that it lets you filter by language and license.