"I was at a hackathon up at Columbia University last weekend and one of the hacks was a development environment that automatically queried StackOverflow and GitHub as you are writing code so that you always have in front of you the answers to the questions you are most likely to ask. The developer who did the hack introduced it by saying something like "programming these days is more about searching than anything else". That reflects how collaborative the sharing of knowledge has become in the world of software development as a result of these cloud based tools for developers."
A core difference here is the contextual and semantic understanding of the code. The way we search and rank ties into alot of coding metrics and semantic parsing of the code around the web using the new 'Roslyn' C#/VB compiler-as-a-service technology.
Most other experiences base their search algorithms on search engines / textual matching / rely on the host web site's search accuracy, where as we combine search engine smarts with semantic and contextual analysis.
Hmm I wonder if I can make a sublime add on to do this for various languages. I could probably do php pretty easy. Anyone keen to do a node module for it? CSS?
Fred Wilson posted on this very topic this morning. http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2014/02/inspired-by-github.html
From his post:
"I was at a hackathon up at Columbia University last weekend and one of the hacks was a development environment that automatically queried StackOverflow and GitHub as you are writing code so that you always have in front of you the answers to the questions you are most likely to ask. The developer who did the hack introduced it by saying something like "programming these days is more about searching than anything else". That reflects how collaborative the sharing of knowledge has become in the world of software development as a result of these cloud based tools for developers."