I remember how excited I was about a decade ago when Microsoft announced the Roslyn project, and how sad I was when switching my dev eco-system before it came out.
AOP wasn't a new concept, and code generation was available - but it was a hard task to get done, and not accessible to the general dev community.
Now, Roslyn ins't news anymore :) We have source generators in C#, and we not only have more main stream compiler plugins & annotation processor in Java and Kotlin (that spends a lot of time on their compiler API).
The same process has happened for the JavaScript ecosystem. The AST revolution has hit the frontend/JS ecosystem big-time. Tools like Babel (and derivatives like jscodeshift and recast) have democratized analysis and transformation of code bases. I urge you to play around with ASTExplorer to see how vast is the support for getting a proper AST for source-code.
Another big factor is the maturity GitHub marketplace. Today, smaller teams are able to ship production-ready apps for GitHub as the APIs have stabilized and are much documented than a few years ago.
All these together makes code-editing products much more feasible than a few years ago. It's not that AST and source editing novel ideas did not exist it's just they matured enough that you can actually build a product that targets a big enough segment of the market.
Now, Roslyn ins't news anymore :) We have source generators in C#, and we not only have more main stream compiler plugins & annotation processor in Java and Kotlin (that spends a lot of time on their compiler API).
The same process has happened for the JavaScript ecosystem. The AST revolution has hit the frontend/JS ecosystem big-time. Tools like Babel (and derivatives like jscodeshift and recast) have democratized analysis and transformation of code bases. I urge you to play around with ASTExplorer to see how vast is the support for getting a proper AST for source-code.
Another big factor is the maturity GitHub marketplace. Today, smaller teams are able to ship production-ready apps for GitHub as the APIs have stabilized and are much documented than a few years ago.
All these together makes code-editing products much more feasible than a few years ago. It's not that AST and source editing novel ideas did not exist it's just they matured enough that you can actually build a product that targets a big enough segment of the market.