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Ask HN: Large scale mapping of JavaScript in the wild?
Is there anybody crawling the web for JavaScript files and looking at metrics or patterns in the way that lexicographers might study a corpus of natural language?
- sova 10y agoNot to my knowledge but that sounds interesting. I think that there is probably a lot of "valid code" that is not necessarily legible to human eyes. Javascript is also rather open in its potential.... Would you be looking at the statistics for how variables are named, or more for the style and format of method/function calls and such?
- zachrose 10y agoIt's only a whim so far, but I think I'd be interested in looking for patterns in ASTs. If you can imagine scraping all the javascript off of a bunch of websites, I'd expect to see something like genotypes of jQuery emerge, with detectable shifts for different versions or builds. If you were looking at JavaScript projects on npm/Github, I'd be interested seeing if projects and authors have a consistent style that's visible at the AST level. If so, would it be possible describe or classify that style in a way that enables finding more work by the same author?
- brak1 10y agoNot really what you are looking for, but if you wanted to research it yourself, something like https://nerdydata.com/search https://nerdydata.com/search might be handy for you...