Thoughts On: Ditty & Automatic Code Reuse

Motivation

This answer on StackOverflow was written once, and read more than 360 times:

I don't know about you, but if I were to use it in my own program, I'd make a few changes:

• Use mktime instead of strtotime, finding some other way to add 1 day than prepending "tomorrow"
• Calculate the time difference in minutes instead of seconds
• Encapsulate the time calculation in a function

Some of it's my personal code aesthetics, and some of it has to do with the particular project I want to use the code in, but I'd wager that more than a few of those 360 visitors would do some of the same things, and that many more would want to if they realized they were options.

But nobody's ever edited or commented on that post to make these modifications, so there's likely a lot of duplicated work going on.

The Big Question

If our computers observed how we adapted code snippets to our project, could we share that information automatically in a way that would save other people time when they want to make similar changes?