Hacker News Reader

Comment by nbbaier | Hacker News Reader

> The solution I've been waiting for is source-code-in-the-database. I'm cheering on multiple projects attempting this.

What are the projects you're especially bullish on?

Hazel and Unison are two of the big ones. I'm friends with some of the Unison folks so I'm biased, but I really like how few features there are in the language. In general I'm just a huge sucker for subtractive improvement: if you can have a small number of awesome things (eg abilities) instead of a bunch of special case things (exception handling, monad trickery, dependency injection machinery) sign me up.

I know less about Hazel, my understanding is that it's source-code-in-CRDTs, which is definitely structured source code though may not technically be in a database.

Is this the unison you mean? https://www.unison-lang.org/

Unrelated: what has your experience been using igneous-linearizer to help understand other people's code?

That's it. And the linearizer is only one way-- you write text with [[links]] and turn that into plaintext.

You may have encountered leo [ https://leo-editor.github.io/leo-editor/ ]. I use it to pull in or write code and break it up into comprehensible pieces. It works, but it feels overcomplex. I'm open to something simpler, and will give this a try.

I had't seen it! The "clones" feature is cool, it sounds like they're way ahead in figuring out how to use transclusions effectively when coding.

Previously I'd thought of using transclusions for things like long-lived documentation. Now reading about Leo it seems like they'd be just as useful for creating short-term views into one's code. Eg start a refactor PR by transcluding all the relevant definitions into a doc. Now you can start writing PR comments in that doc before you even begin coding, and when you do all the relevant code is right there.

VisualAge C++, Java, and Smalltalk.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com