Developers hunt for 'Satan' in software code

Code search tool reveals what lies within

Clement James, vnunet.com 06 May 2008

Software developers are known to hide all sorts of 'Easter eggs' in their code, but code search engine Krugle has revealed just what might be found among the billions of lines of open source code available on the web.

Krugle searches across code repositories and development resources, using contextual search to provide insights to developers working for networks such as IBM Developer Works, CollabNet and SourceForge.net.

The application allows developers to use existing code, perform impact analysis and easily learn new code.

In terms of distinctly non-Java searches fed into Krugle recently, 'Knuth' returned the highest number of hits in honour of leading computer scientist and 'father of algorithm analysis' Donald Knuth, far outstripping 'Satan'.

'George Bush' edged out 'Britney Spears' and the fifth-ranked 'Fidel Castro', while 'Paris Hilton' rounded out the bottom of the rankings.

'Hillary Clinton' dominated the presidential candidates, followed by 'John McCain' and 'Barack Obama'.

"Code search provides a lot of value to enterprises beyond just finding code you can reuse," said Mel Badgett, vice president of product marketing at Krugle.

"Fortune 500 companies are increasingly using Krugle in new and unexpected ways such as finding bugs in existing code.

"But we thought we'd have some fun and look to see what Java terms are searched for the most and how often open source developers include celebrity names in their code."

Leading up to the JavaOne Conference, Krugle also examined trends in the most popular Java searches by their users.

'J2me' led the Java queries at Krugle in March, followed by 'hadoop', 'swing', 'superwava' and 'dozer'.

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