A lot of this reads like code search tools could and should be a lot better. They probably will be with AI finding its way into everything. In the old days, people would Hungarian prefix types, but now the IDE mitigates that with color codes.
Right now, code search is basically just text search. If you think code search tools “could and should” be a lot better, what kind of improvements are you thinking about? How would those improvements work?
1. The popular "Find Usages" which varies widely in accuracy and reliability by language, IDE, and codebase meta-quirks.
2. Tools that show Callee/Caller trees, and sometimes possible data-flows between variables.
3. DSLs to search hierarchies, like how XPath lets you find XML elements based on nesting, rather than relying on a distinctly greppable single tag-name for the leaf you're interested in. (e.g. `<Product><Name>` vs `<ProductName>`)
When things go well, the actual variable name no longer needs to restate certain aspects and relationships that can instead be found through metadata.
For example, `GiftCard.purchaser_customer_uuid` is nicely greppable, but you could relax that to `GiftCard.purchaser` if it had a static type of `UUID<Customer>`. Or perhaps you could go to the `Customer.uuid` definition and say "Show me all variables that can populate or be-populated-by this one, up to X steps out, and excluding ones that are function scoped."
That said, I do advocate for "greppability" as a general practice, since I seldom trust that languages, tools, or institutions will come together in a way that makes it unnecessary.
The solution—to write code which is less dynamic—helps code search and features like find usages.
It allows you to grep inside source code, but limit the search to e.g. “only docstrings inside class definitions”, among other things. That is, it allows nesting and is syntax aware. That example is for Python, but the tool speaks more languages (thanks to treesitter).
https://github.com/alexpovel/srgn/blob/main/README.md#multip...
We have lots of code search that is much more syntax-aware than just text search, but it tends to be behind very limited UI, because we have all the tech to do much better code search, but no one has come up with a generally-usable UI for it, so we just have very specific instances -- like "go to definition", "find references" , etc.
That takes all the same technological bits that would be need for, say, "find all definitions of functions visible in the current scope whose name starts with 'ban'" or "find all definitions of int8 constants visible in the current scope"...but what's the UI that makes that kind of searching outside of the kind of special cases now behind their own IDE menu items usable?
$ helm get values -n $NS $DEPLOYMENT -o json | gron | grep resources | gron -u | json-to-yaml.py
elasticsearch:
client:
resources:
limits:
cpu: 3
memory: 4Gi
requests:
cpu: 1
memory: 2Gi
data:
resources:
limits:
cpu: 6
memory: 6Gi
requests:
cpu: 200m
memory: 2Gi
fluentd:
resources:
limits:
memory: 768Mi
requests:
memory: 384Mi
This is self-inflicted.