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There might be an opportunity somewhere around this area to combine the versioning, continuous improvement, and dependency management of package repositories with the Q&A format of StackOverflow.

Something like "cherry pick this answer, with attribution, and notifications when flaws and/or improvements are found".

Maybe that's a terrible idea (there's definitely risk involved, and the potential to spread and create bad software), but equally I don't know why it would be significantly worse than unattributed code snippets and trends towards single-function libraries.




NodeJS did something a lot like this by having packages that are just short snippets, but half the ecosystem flipped out when someone messed up `leftpad`.


Well that and because having 20,000 packages in your project is a PITA in various ways.

Mostly but not entirely because NPM handled things poorly in various ways.


Not sure if it's quite what you had in mind, but SO is starting to address the issue of updating old answers with the Outdated Answers Project: https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/405302/introducing-...


Very relevant, thank you!


Sadly updates don't just remove bugs, but sometimes also add them. Silently adding a bug to previously working code is a lot more bad than silently fixing a bug you didn't know you had is good, so I wouldn't want to have a load of self-updating code snippets in my codebase.




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