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I'm waiting for someone to figure out that coding is essentially a sequence of refactoring steps where each step is a code transformation that transforms it fro

I'm waiting for someone to figure out that coding is essentially a sequence of refactoring steps where each step is a code transformation that transforms it from one valid state to another. Equipping refactoring IDEs with an MCP facade would give direct access to that as well as feedback on compilation state and lots of other information. That makes it a lot easier to do structured transformations of entire code bases without having to feed the entire code base as a context and then hope the LLM hallucinates together the right tokens and uses reasoning to figure out if it might be correct. They are actually pretty good at doing that but it doesn't scale very well currently and gets expensive quickly (in time and tokens). This stuff is indeed inherently harder for dynamic languages. But it's been standard for (some) statically compiled languages like Java, Kotlin, C#, Scala, etc. for most of this century. I was using refactoring IDEs for Java as early as 2002.

pjmlp 2y ago
Which based many of their tools on what Xerox PARC has done with their Smalltalk, Mesa (XDE), Mesa/Cedar, Interlisp-D environments. This kind of processing is possible on dynamic languages, when using an image base system, as it also contains metadata that somehow takes the role of static types. From the previous list only Mesa and Cedar are statically typed.
_QrE 2y ago
It's not really that much harder, if at all, for dynamic languages, because you can use type hints in some cases (i.e. Python), and a different language (typescript) in case of Javascript; there's plenty of tools that'll tell you if you're not respecting those type hints, and you can feed the output to the LLM. But yeah, if we get better & faster models, then hopefully we might get to a point where we can let the LLM manage its own context itself, and then we can see what it can do with large codebases.
igouy 2y ago
Smalltalk Refactoring Browser! (Where do you think Java IDEs got the idea from?) "A very large Smalltalk application was developed at Cargill to support the operation of grain elevators and the associated commodity trading activities. The Smalltalk client application has 385 windows and over 5,000 classes. About 2,000 classes in this application interacted with an early (circa 1993) data access framework. The framework dynamically performed a mapping of object attributes to data table columns. Analysis showed that although dynamic look up consumed 40% of the client execution time, it was unnecessary. A new data layer interface was developed that required the business class to provide the object attribute to column mapping in an explicitly coded method. Testing showed that this interface was orders of magnitude faster. The issue was how to change the 2,100 business class users of the data layer. A large application under development cannot freeze code while a transformation of an interface is constructed and tested. We had to construct and test the transformations in a parallel branch of the code repository from the main development stream. When the transformation was fully tested, then it was applied to the main code stream in a single operation. Less than 35 bugs were found in the 17,100 changes. All of the bugs were quickly resolved in a three-week period. If the changes were done manually we estimate that it would have taken 8,500 hours, compared with 235 hours to develop the transformation rules. The task was completed in 3% of the expected time by using Rewrite Rules. This is an improvement by a factor of 36." from “Transformation of an application data layer” Will Loew-Blosser OOPSLA 2002 https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/604251.604258 https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/604251.604258
- pjmlp 2y ago
  > Smalltalk Refactoring Browser! (Where do you think Java IDEs got the idea from?) Eclipse still has the navigation browser from Visual Age for Smalltalk. :)
seanhunter 1y ago
Feels like this would be possible to achieve using group theory and a lot of work on representing ASTs of program segments in such a way as to be able to invert them.

pjmlp 2y ago

Which based many of their tools on what Xerox PARC has done with their Smalltalk, Mesa (XDE), Mesa/Cedar, Interlisp-D environments. This kind of processing is possible on dynamic languages, when using an image base system, as it also contains metadata that somehow takes the role of static types. From the previous list only Mesa and Cedar are statically typed.

_QrE 2y ago

It's not really that much harder, if at all, for dynamic languages, because you can use type hints in some cases (i.e. Python), and a different language (typescript) in case of Javascript; there's plenty of tools that'll tell you if you're not respecting those type hints, and you can feed the output to the LLM. But yeah, if we get better & faster models, then hopefully we might get to a point where we can let the LLM manage its own context itself, and then we can see what it can do with large codebases.

igouy 2y ago

Smalltalk Refactoring Browser! (Where do you think Java IDEs got the idea from?) "A very large Smalltalk application was developed at Cargill to support the operation of grain elevators and the associated commodity trading activities. The Smalltalk client application has 385 windows and over 5,000 classes. About 2,000 classes in this application interacted with an early (circa 1993) data access framework. The framework dynamically performed a mapping of object attributes to data table columns. Analysis showed that although dynamic look up consumed 40% of the client execution time, it was unnecessary. A new data layer interface was developed that required the business class to provide the object attribute to column mapping in an explicitly coded method. Testing showed that this interface was orders of magnitude faster. The issue was how to change the 2,100 business class users of the data layer. A large application under development cannot freeze code while a transformation of an interface is constructed and tested. We had to construct and test the transformations in a parallel branch of the code repository from the main development stream. When the transformation was fully tested, then it was applied to the main code stream in a single operation. Less than 35 bugs were found in the 17,100 changes. All of the bugs were quickly resolved in a three-week period. If the changes were done manually we estimate that it would have taken 8,500 hours, compared with 235 hours to develop the transformation rules. The task was completed in 3% of the expected time by using Rewrite Rules. This is an improvement by a factor of 36." from “Transformation of an application data layer” Will Loew-Blosser OOPSLA 2002 https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/604251.604258 https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/604251.604258

pjmlp 2y ago
> Smalltalk Refactoring Browser! (Where do you think Java IDEs got the idea from?) Eclipse still has the navigation browser from Visual Age for Smalltalk. :)

seanhunter 1y ago

Feels like this would be possible to achieve using group theory and a lot of work on representing ASTs of program segments in such a way as to be able to invert them.