Codefixbot

I just had the neatest idea. One of the nicest things about Perl/CPAN is the CPAN Testers Network - if you package your module with tests and put it on CPAN, hundreds of automated testing systems running different versions of Perl on different machines under different operating systems test it for you and email you the results.

I can't say how outstanding that is for code quality.

So. Code quality. I posted a couple of days ago about code quality. Here's the first iteration of my idea: a generic code quality tester that would crawl open-source repositories (aside: since the demise of Google Code, there is no universal code index, and that should change), identify problems, and if on e.g. Github, automatically create and submit a pull request to fix common errors. But otherwise attempt to format an easy patch and get in touch with the authors.

That's cool enough - a sort of universal code quality assurance system that would just ... fix everything it finds. But then I came to the second iteration of my Good Idea, which is something even more interesting: a code generator bot. Let's say I have some kind of idea and a language to express it in - the bot could come by and generate, say, C++ or Java code to implement my idea.

OK, granted, that's vague. But surely there's some kind of continuum there from the easy to imagine (code quality automation on the loose) to the Singularity (write a blog post about something you want, and the Internet implements it for you and links to it from a comment). And honestly - what a philanthropic opportunity!

So now I know what I want to do this year. Just gotta jam it onto the priority list.