Please Evaluate My Startup Idea
I was working with a poorly written code yesterday and had an idea for a startup. What if there was a online tool that you could submit a poorly written and indented code such as "while(1){ if (1){do(x);}}" and it would give you back a nice and correctly indented code like
while(1) { if(1) { do(x); } }
I was working at financial services company(Goldman Sachs) a while ago and they had a helper "software" that did this. Any software that was checked in had to run this helper tool which made all code at GS feature the same look-and-feel which was really really great. I even remember the indenting was always 4 spaces.
What do you think about this kind of online tool? I don't have time to do it myself, so if anyone wants to do it, please go ahead :). You also make money by, say, charging for a code that's 2000 lines or longer. Maybe Paul Graham would even give you money for that :).
Please let me know what you think.
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9 comments
| 2 points
| on HN
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(01) A start-up is a business venture. It takes as input money, sweat and tears and can give you an output from a big loss to a few million dollars or more.
(02) Your idea is actually for an on-line tool. There are actually many tools that can do this for you, google for example javascript beautifier or your language + formatter. Most professional programmers will also be working in IDE that automatically does that. I cannot actually imagine any programmer paying for this!
By the way guaranteed, you will make zero money from Python developers!
<i>doh!</i>
If you post a code sample and don't properly indent it, someone with high rep will correct it in within minutes. Such nice people.