Code-friendlier wiki ?

So you've got this nice piece of code that you factored out of your last big project into a library. You were careful to make it general enough to be useful for others, and would like to share it.
Now you've got three options:

  • create a wiki account and write a nice library page; you'll get no comments on your code, and it'll appear as an almost-official lib, which you feel is too much of a status for your just released class; plus, editing a wiki page with code, comments and decent formatting needs some time to get used to;
  • start a new topic in the "library" thread; you'll get nice "well done" or "thank you" comments but your code will soon sink under the pile of new topics; you can still reference the thread in the wiki index pages, though;
  • you host your code on github or sourceforge, and post a link in one of the wiki index pages and in the library thread too; not the easiest way to share a couple of c++ files and less than 1k lines of code.

To be clear: this is NOT a rant, it's how I see the situation now. Feel free to correct me :slight_smile:
Some 2 cents to improve the code-friendliness of the forum:

  • post some code with structured comments (e.g. a simplified javadoc-like syntax) and have code and comments automatically formatted in a nice-looking and easy to read way;
  • allow users to comment code, e.g. allowing comments on wiki pages.
  • syntax coloring (low priority but useful imho)

To summarize: I think Arduino has a good library offering, but I feel contributing and reviewing code is still a little more difficult than it should be. Improving this side of the website can lead to more and better contributed code.

Thanks for reading :slight_smile: