| I think this project is great, but I tend to agree with others - it's going to be somewhat doomed by second-system effects and the fact that coding is a social art form. You have to get other developers to buy in to what you're doing to be successful. So what I wonder is this: is there a migration path instead? If the goal is to ultimately work on ASTs instead of treating software as a giant string, is there a way we can make incremental transformations to languages to move in that direction. So far what I've considered is this: 1 - Automated formatting such as gofmt which eliminates any decisions around whitespace to culture people towards treating code as data rather than prose 2 - Language-aware editors that constrain user input to valid states based on 1 3 - Plugins for version control systems to optionally do diffs on ASTs rather than plain files 4 - Compilers that can operate on ASTs instead of strings 5 - Checking in ASTs rather than strings based on 3 and 4 6 - Updating editors 2 to operate on ASTs since 5 makes it reasonable to always work on ASTs rather than text 7 - Creating new styles of code editors that visualize and manipulate ASTs in ways that are independent of their text representations There's probably steps I'm missing. I'm only just getting in to this space so I'm ignorant of most research that has been done in this area. |
When you get right down to it, "working on ASTs" basically means working in lisp. The idea is you have a canonical, external format for the AST; it might as well be s-expressions. The trouble is that lisp culture is highly resistant to any other syntax than raw s-expressions. They say things like "making alternate syntaxes is a rite of passage, but everyone gets used to the parentheses in the end."[1]
Racket alone encourages the creation of alternate syntaxes, and provides the tools to make it easy. You can have any syntax you want, and yet never be hamstrung by syntax decisions because you can always make a new version of your #lang, and it'll all be nicely compatible because it gets turned into s-expressions anyway. This isn't just theoretical - you can for example already write Python in Racket [2], except with full access to all of Racket's libraries as well as Python's. This turns the social aspect to its advantage. Imagine if Python had been written in Racket to begin with - the 2->3 nightmare would have been a non-issue.
I hope that eventually, all languages will have swappable syntaxes with a canonical s-expression form, and be distinguished purely by their fundamentally incompatible semantics. We may find we need far fewer incompatible silos that way.
Incidentally, and I don't think it's a coincidence, Racket's IDE is the furthest along the non-textual route of any "real" language I've seen. It's very next-gen - you can paste an image file directly into source code, for instance (try it, (define my-image <pasted image>) actually works!).
[1] I view all "rites of passage" with suspicion. Like the "rite of passage" of wielding 'rm' incautiously, they usually indicate a human factors failure.
[2] https://github.com/pedropramos/PyonR