Comment by falcolas
6 years ago
An AST is directly representable via text - via the very syntax you use to write the ‘linear document’. What’s holding us back is not necessarily the text, it’s the editors which are (generally) only able to edit text, not an AST.
It should be possible (if not easy) to create a zoomable UI that lets you interact with code directly as well as zooming out to view and interact with the code structure in a meaningful way.
Maybe the problem isn't so much the text representation but the absence of a canonical representation. If there was a well define canonical representation for any program then it would be trivial to view and edit it in my prefered style without messing up the diffs in the repo.
Code formatters help, some more than others but most are far from producing a canonical format. This means that I either need to edit in the projects prefered style or have my editor carefully track which sections I haven't modified and be sure to write them back exactly as the originally appeared.
See I wouldn't agree. I use JetBrains IDEs and I never feel as though I am working on a linear document. Between 'jump to definition', 'see usages', and various 'refactor' commands, it is easy to navigate and edit the tree structure.