samir, a terminally deprecated methodAn idea that may or may not be terrible, written down so I can get it out of my head and into someone who can do something about it.
What if we started from scratch with code represented as graphs, not text?
Henrik Jernevad@samir I think the ideas are very interesting!
To me everything on the "computer side" of that graphs seems "easy". We have a lot of graph algorithms to play with. That is the kind of stuff computer scientists would love to work on. But what would an effective UI for humans look like?
An AST for a text-based language is typically much harder to work with as a human. The text representation is more condensed and "human-like".
@samir Also a more minor thing, but I'm not sure I think "Autoformatters become unnecessary." Why wouldn't you need an auto layout tool for the graph? Or at least for a particular (persisted?) view of it. And most formatters lean into linting and bug detection. I suspect you would need to lint your graph too.
@henrikjernevad Agreed, it’s the concept of auto-formatting on save that goes away, not the tech.
Rob@samir @henrikjernevad still entirely reasonable that I'd want to manipulate a graph to the "standardized" format on save the same way that autoformatters do
@simrob @henrikjernevad I think that would just be the only format. Autoformatters don’t (shouldn’t) modify the syntax graph.