I think it's fair to be sad that greappability is being lost. But I also don't think we should limit ourselves to it; treating it as a design goal holds back th

I think it's fair to be sad that greappability is being lost. But I also don't think we should limit ourselves to it; treating it as a design goal holds back the field. Languages can be much more powerful when they drop that constraint and assume the reader has (language-aware) tooling available to help them make sense of code. I think instead we should focus on continuing to push the tooling forward. Language servers were an important step in this direction, freeing us from comprehensive IDEs, but I think that's just the tip of the iceberg. More recently we have Tree Sitter, and GitHub at least can do some basic semantic analysis of code right in their UI. How can we make it even easier to build tools that understand a language? And what new interfaces can we put on top of them? What about a CLI that lets you grep code at an AST level, maybe showing the types of the expressions it yields? What about a declarative format like TextMate that lets you describe the basics of how a type system is wired, so you don't have to craft a whole language server by hand? Maybe there's also something to be said for designing languages to be "tooling-friendly", even if that doesn't mean "as plain-text". Lowering the bar for writing tooling that can have a semantic understanding of the syntax and types, etc. There's lots to be explored here, in my opinion