A friend raised a question the other day and it was one of those ideas that sounds good at least on first hearing. Ideally paired programming takes place together in the same room but what if that is not practical?
His idea was mating an instant messenger client with a code sharing client as plug-ins in an IDE (like Eclipse, Netbeans, etc.). The code sharing plug-in would work to ensure the two views of the code remained in sync (maybe syncing them each time a save was done by an editor locally?) and the IM plug-in would be for assisting remote communications.
So rather than consider re-inventing the wheel when I am not even sure I have time to do this, I thought I would ask here if anyone has heard of anything like this? This might also be useful in educational situations, so that an instructor could choose to sync with a particular student then examine his/her problem or solution.
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