StackOverflow has been a boon for increasing programming knowledge by allowing developers to ask for help and knowledge related to programming. Oftentimes these questions boil down to:
This code is broken, fix it
I don't know how to do this
Is this the best approach (hard question to answer on StackExchange, but democratic)
Oftentimes, however, these questions are discussed at a very high level. "I use web services with a proxy client to ..."
But, as Grady Booch is fond of saying "the Truth is raw, naked, running code". Those high level descriptions can be accomplished in any ways. Programming is an Art, and there are an infinite number of different ways to do things. But some are better than others.
A site devoted to Q&A can help increase knowledge...a site devoted to critique of code can help elevate standards and result in higher quality knowledge. By upvoting the most elegant ways to solve a short, concise problem statement, or just looking at a piece of code and saying "this is ugly, how can we fix it?" we can increase community participation in discussions about the substantive details of an approach:
"is my commenting clear?
"Is this 3 nested for-loops with a continue that breaks in a special case a good way of building an object?"
"Does this extremely generic and polymorphic inheritance hierarchy have issues?")
Code is an art/craft and science/engineering artifact. Doesn't it deserve the same type of review treatment as a painting and an experiment? For praising those that provide that moment of zen when looking at exceptionally good code that makes you believe in a better tomorrow, and panning those whose offal is so offensive that were you to meet them on the job you'd say "YOU! GET OUT!!!"
Hence, CodeCritics. A collaborative critiquing platform in the style of StackOverflow focused solely on critiquing code that can act as a collaborative code review and assist in the discovery of Design Patterns.
