I do think I have a better way of doing things: instead of writing snippets that people then copy and paste, write functions, methods, and modules that people can then simply call.

This results in software containing ten times less code, which makes it dramatically easier to fix, maintain, and extend, than a system built by copying and pasting code snippets.

Now, I am not going to claim that this is a new idea. Ada Byron, after all, invented the subroutine. What I am going to claim is that programming by pasting snippets together and editing them, which is not a new idea either, is a stupid idea. The idea is probably at least as old as the subroutine. We have something like 60 years of experience with programming by copy-and-paste. That's plenty of time to figure out that it's stupid. It's a bad idea. It makes your programs hard to understand and hard to change. We'll probably never stop doing it, because sometimes it's unavoidable. But having a search engine that makes it even easier to paste code snippets does not make pasting code snippets a better idea. It makes it a worse idea, because it means that you can screw yourself more quickly and thoroughly.

I want to see a case that you think is better written using pasted-together snippets of code instead of by calling subroutines. The burden of proof is not on me; I'm just explaining the conventional wisdom. It's on you if you want to show that the conventional wisdom is wrong.

I do think that a search engine for APIs would be useful, and that a lot of APIs suck.