Paul Irish. The Top 5 Places to Share Code Quickly. Collaborative development or getting development help from your peers online dictates that you share code with people, but that’s not always possible.
If you’re on IRC, pasting giant blocks of code into a public chat channel is annoying for everyone else, and sharing code via instant messenger or email is clumsy, slow, and hard to read (since those tools lack code formatting and line numbering). That’s where pastebins come in.