Exposing programming frustrations with Google Code Search
October 5th, 2006 by Ivo
Recently, Google opened a search engine that will appeal to all developers: Google Code Search, for searching through all available source code on the web.
While this is great to find example usages of functions, or to find security vulnerabilities, a far more fun thing to do is delve into the frustrations developers encounter while developing code. Frustrations that are filtered out by the compiler, and are hidden away into source code comments.
This search for example is a nice one, and I had a good laugh at the first result of this search.
You can also see how programmers think about certain big corporations when using their API's. 
It's also fun to see how much faith developers have in their code.
Finally, it's nice to have a way to see how much legends such as 'foo' are actually used, and that some developers even put prayers in their programs.
One tip: if you search for PHP variables, prepend the $ with a , as Google Code Search supports regular expressions, so you have to escape certain characters.