Apparently, you can search code

I didnt know this before, but there exist search engines for finding code that you can reuse. They didnt seem intelligent enough to me, and my being a first time user probably didnt help matters. (I am becoming a bit of a UI buff these days; I noticed that there ought to be checkboxes, rather than radio buttons or drop-down boxes for selecting languages within which to search.) I was trying to find some decent javascript code for doing generic form validations, and it took me a few tries before I could find one to my satisfaction. The problem seems to be that the only things there to be searched are the comments and the code themselves, and there are many ways of writing the same thing. E.g., isInteger(), checkInt(), validateInt(), intCheck() etc etc all do the same thing, and the search engine doesnt know well enough to return them all for the search 'validate form'. Still, I guess you can extract some value out of this by understanding how this usually works.

I got to know about this from a Wired article, that talks about Krugle, a new code searcher thats about to be launched. (Thanks to the SophistPundit)

The new service joins other source-code search engines like Koders and Codefetch, but Krugle intends to differentiate itself by allowing developers to annotate code and documentation, create bookmarks and save collections of search results in a tabbed workspace. Saved workspaces have unique URLs, so developers can send an entire collection of annotated code to a co-worker just by e-mailing a link.

Cool.

Krugle also contains intelligence to help it parse code and to differentiate programming languages, so a PHP developer could search for a website-registration system written in PHP simply by typing "PHP registration system."

Duh. Intelligence to recognise the language? Even my paleolithic VI can do that.