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Comment by izoow | Hacker News Reader

I often thought about a concept of an “IDE” where there are no files. You would instead have a “database” of functions/classes that you work with. Some modern IDEs come close, but you still have to worry about files. I guess getting rid of files completely might require some extra magic from the IDE to make it work with current programming languages. Does something like this exist?

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This sounds very similar to how a Smalltalk development environment works. Instead of a file system you have a class browser that you use to navigate your code.

Take it a step further and instead of a database use content addressing. https://www.unisonweb.org/

In an abstract way it's not really different. Next you'll want namespaces and sub-namespaces, and we're back to files and directories, just built again on top of something that's not a file system.

I have an idea for an IDE that stores functions independently, and instead of being contained in classes/modules defined by syntactical scope delineated by eg curly braces, they simply get tags that you can browse/search/filter in various ways. I image something like a UML class browser with little planes containing code snippets and connections between them for call graphs etc.

Yep I think this will be my next major project. Taking inspiration from Rust, Go/Zig, Nix, Unison, Old SmallTalk and Self videos, Eve, and probably SQLite/Postgres.

There is a lot of separate innovation that could be combined; so I think.

While inspired from these various things I doubt it would just be "another smalltalk" or "just a nocode thing" which many modern versions of this end up looking like.

IBM Visual Age for smalltalk and Java worked like this.

You could technically do this with Rust. rust-analyzer will allow you to jump to certain types, functions, etc, and Rust has first-class modules.

Things like rust-analyzer are exactly what I think lead me to believe... what if code was designed to be imported by a "database" and then changes could be made there and serialized back. Not too dissimilar to how unison lets you select functions to edit, but drop the cli and text files requirements. Create an API/UI/etc. to edit the "code" in the "database".

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