Comment by pjungwir

It would be nice to have an IDE that surfaced something like the AST. Of course lots do to some extent, but I bet there is room for improvement here. This also seems like a place where Lisp would have an advantage since the syntax is so transparent.

For readers of yesterday's article about whether all the "easy" stuff has already been accomplished, here is an easy-to-read survey of the state of the art in diffing trees:

http://useless-factor.blogspot.com/2008/01/matching-diffing-...

That sounds like a pretty interesting topic to research! And I note that his oldest citation is from 1997, and most are from the last ten years. He also briefly mentions "operational transformation," which I agree seems related and is another area of ongoing research. Both topics seem like they would have lots of practical applications, but right now the general-purpose tooling is weak or doesn't exist. So there is room not just for research but also for folks to implement that research.