[xedrac]

This sounds good in theory, but it means Beagle needs to understand how to parse every language, and keep up with how they evolve. This sounds like a ton of work and a regression could be a disaster. It'll be interesting to see how this progresses though.

[bri3d]

IMO this really isn’t a huge problem for this project specifically, since that part is outsourced to tree-sitter which has a lot of effort behind it to begin with.

I think this project is incredibly cool as a line of research / thought but my general experience in trying to provide human interfaces using abstractions over source code suggests that most people in general and programmers especially are better at reasoning in the source code space. Of course, beagle can generate into the source code space at each user interaction point, but at that point, why not do the opposite thing, which is what we already do with language servers and AST driven (semantic) merge and diff tools?

[ibejoeb]

It's also just one more facet. The problem already exists for anything else that we already have, like formatters, linters, syntax highlighters, language servers... And it's also not an exclusive choice. If you want to use a dumb editor, there's nothing preventing that. All of the machinery to go back and forth to text exists. Not really a huge departure.

[computably]

> AST driven (semantic) merge and diff tools?

Would you say these are commonly in use, and if so what are some "mainstream" examples? IME most people just use git's built-in diff/merge...

[mtndew4brkfst]

I find Mergiraf pretty pleasant to use and frequently pretty helpful as a time-saver. Handles TOML and Rust for me, and I have way fewer manual interventions, especially after supplementing it with rustfmt rules to not do a bunch of merged use statements in one go. Easy to configure as a jujutsu tool as well.

https://mergiraf.org/