Comment by Cthulhu_
1 year ago
On a smaller scale it reminds me of the original concept of Light Table, which let go of the abstraction of individual files in favor of editing your code in a tree like structure. It's a shame this concept seems to have died out, I'd be curious about alternatives to plain file based UX.
Cool. My long-term vision for software development would be to make a new programming environment that structures code in ASTs and stores it in a database rather than file based. However, that will have to come later. First this :)
You should check Unison language. Each Unison definition is identified by a hash of its syntax tree. So if two unrelated functions have identical AST this means they that from language perspective it's the same function.
https://www.unison-lang.org/docs/the-big-idea/
a friend/old coworker of mine played with that idea in datalog and wrote about it. https://petevilter.me/post/datalog-typechecking/ it had some pretty cool implications.
Sometimes I daydream that we moved beyond text files and had a format with a UUID per line.
Version control could reliably track movement between files, we could identify copy and paste (and prompt when refactoring), and code coverage changes would be accurate.
I'd forgotten about that. I liked the idea and contributed on KickStarter, but it never matured to the point that I felt comfortable using it.
I see the website is still up, albeit dated 2014!