Open source is cutting across the world as solution revolution. It is making technology cheaper and more widely available. It could have positive far reaching consequences in education and aerospace technology, but all revolutions need a little help getting off the ground.
“Open source projects need all the help they can get. If not with funding, then with volunteers contributing to open source programming and free tools they can brandish. Search engines tuned with algorithms to find source code for programming projects are among the tools for the kit bag. While reusing code is a much debated topic in higher circles, they could be of help to beginner programmers and those trying to work their way through a coding logjam by cross-referencing their code.”
Makeuseof.com points to the article, “Open Source Matters: 6 Source Code Search Engines You Can Use For Programming Projects” that lists code search engines to help developers out in their projects. Ohloh Code is one of the largest code search engines with over ten billion code lines in its system. It allows users to search by different code classes, but currently it does not support regular expressions. SearchCode searches through open source communities such as Github, SourceForge, and CodePlex. Amazingly, a single person maintains it. For those who have code with special symbols, Google and other engines cannot cut it. That is where Symbol Hound sniffs around the Net for odd character.
There are a few more code search engines described in the article, but head on over to read it on your own. Code search engines are indicative of the open source mentality-share and spread the wealth.
Whitney Grace, September 06, 2013
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Beyond Search
