[tessierashpool]

dependency graphs and code analysis are huge topics. this is probably the hard part with libraries like npm or Bundler.

the graphs can have cycles, multiple references to the same dependency, multiple distinct versions of the same dependency, et cetera. it's also all very, very language-specific. in many languages, the order of the require or import statements matter; in others, they don't. you can also have something like Clojure, with several different ways of bringing in a dependency, which makes the whole issue much more fine-grained.

prior to writing these scripts, I tried to do something more ambitious with auto-refactoring tools. these exist in Eclipse and can even be graceful in Smalltalk but my own results were not so amazing. I got somewhere with regular expressions, code generation, and shell scripting. but I also built a thing in Ruby which could auto-refactor a tiny, TINY subset of the most obvious refactorings in JavaScript. it took me months, maybe harmed my sanity, and was definitely not the best code I ever wrote.

TLDR: compilers, zomg.

edit: forgot to say you're welcome. :-)