What are you coding? Let us know, copy paste a snippet to Pastie. Pastie is a service for anyone to communicate through the exchange of quick short code snippets. It is a type of Twitter for code. In fact Pastie is more loosely connected to the “rest of the world” than Twitter. There is no user system but a simple API. Besides manual pasting you can also paste from your console, from your text editor, or from an IRC channel, Pastie is close to where you work.
Screenshot from a code snippet on Pastie.
Pastie displays the snippets color coded and well indented, must haves for reading any type of code. It currently supports 14 programming languages including Shell Script, Ruby, Java, C++, SQL, and CSS.
Every snippet has a unique URL, so you can reference them elsewhere. It is generally used in the developer forums. Rather than pasting the code in the forum people just give a link to the beautifully displayed snippet on Pastie.
The simple Pastie API enables developing interesting new applications. There are already remote interfaces that enable using Pastie from TextMate, Vim, Shell console, and Ruby console. Using the API is quite easy, all you do is connect via HTTP and send the code snippet and the language type. I think Pastie could play nicely with any other web application. I can think of using Pastie as part of a social networking application for example. That would enable sharing “my code snippets” with friends and see their snippet stream in my large-scale conversations. Just like video or photo stream, code snippets from friends can be fed in to our fat RSS readers. That would make programming more fun, and social?
Pastie is created by Josh Goebel, one of the contributors to the Ruby on Rails project and co-author of the popular Ruby on Rails forum application Beast.
I’d like to mention another fantastic pasting system Paste (currently offline), an artwork from Martin Wattenberg and his collaborator Marek Walczak. You paste whatever is in your clipboard, something that’s on your mind or just a distraction. Paste combines these pastes into a single text stream, you appreciate the minutia of collective consciousness.