What's even funnier is how much they attack anyone who points this out.
It's against the HN guidelines (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html), boring, unenlightening, not intellectually gratifying, degrades the quality of the site, and takes far less intelligence than the "mental equivalent of scurvy" that you name. Don't do it.
I think most people's amazement with lsp relates to the practical benefits of such a project _not_ being thrown away but taken that last 10% (which is 90% of the work) to make it suitable for so many use cases and selling people on the idea of doing so.
And yeah, I am definitely coming for Lisp.
I do miss the "wrap" command when using other editors, but it could be implemented reasonably easily without a parse tree. I found that a lot of the structural edits correspond to indentation levels anyway, but the parse tree definitely helps.
Google just recently figured this out (That Documents need to be Hierarchical):
https://lifehacker.com/tech/how-to-use-google-docs-tabs
Also interestingly both Documents and Code will some day be combined. Imagine a big tree structure that contains not only computer code but associated documentation. Again probably Jupyter Notebooks is the closest thing to this we have today, because it does incorporate code and text, but afaik it's not fully "Hierarchical" which is the key.
I've had a tree-based block-editor CMS (as my side project) for well over a decade and when Jupyter came out they copied most of my design, except for the tree part, because trees are just hard. That was good, because now when people ask me what my app "is" or "does" I can just say it's mostly like Jupyter, which is easier than starting from scratch with "Imagine if a paragraph was an actual standalone thing...yadda yadda."
#define FOO }
int main() {
FOO
I'm curious about this unnamed ongoing work (that is unaware of incremental parsing).
Anyone know what he is referring to?
Heck, incremental lexing is even easy to explain. For each token, track where the lexer actually looked in the input stream to make decisions. Any time that part of the input stream changes, every token to actually look at the changed portion of the input stream is re-lexed, and if the result changes, keep re-lexing until the before/after tokenstreams sync up again or you run out of input. That's it.
You can also make a dumber version that statically calculates the maximum lookahead (lookbehind if you support that too) of the entire grammer, or the maximum possible lookahead per token, and uses that instead of tracking the actual lookahead used. In practice, this is often harder than just tracking the actual lookahead used.
In an LL system like ANTLR, incremental parsing is very similar - since it generates top-down parsers, it's the same basic theory - track what token ranges were looked at as you parse. During incremental update, only descend into portions of the parse tree where the token ranges looked at contain modified tokens.
Bottom up is trickier. Error recovery is the meaningfully tricky part in all of this.
Before tree-sitter, I was constantly explaining this stuff to people (I followed the projects that these algorithms came out of - ENSEMBLE, HARMONIA, etc). After more people get that there are ways of doing this, but you still run into people who are re-creating things we solved in pretty great ways many years ago.
Seems like "annoying" refers to a user interface annoyance.
I'm guessing the following since I couldn't tell what structured editing is like from the article:
Keyboard entry is immediate, but prone to breaking the program structure. Structured editing through specific commands is an abstraction on top of key entry (or mouse), both of which add a layer of resistance. Another layer might come from having to recall the commands, or if recognizing them, having to peruse a list of them, at least while learning it.
What does the developer's experience with incremental parsing feel like?
It's essentially the experience most of us already have when using Visual Studio, IntelliJ, or any modern IDE on a daily basis.
The term "incremental parsing" might be a bit misleading. A more accurate (though wordier) term would be a "stateful parser capable of reparsing the text in parts". The core idea is that you can write text seamlessly while the editor dynamically updates local fragments of its internal representation (usually a syntax tree) in real time around the characters you're typing.
An incremental parser is one of the key components that enable modern code editors to stay responsive. It allows the editor to keep its internal syntax tree synchronized with the user's edits without needing to reparse the entire project on every keystroke. This stateful approach contrasts with stateless compilers that reparse the entire project from scratch.
This continuous (or incremental) patching of the syntax tree is what enables modern IDEs to provide features like real-time code completion, semantic highlighting, and error detection. Essentially, while you focus on writing code, the editor is constantly maintaining and updating a structural representation of your program behind the scenes.
The article's author suggests an alternative idea: instead of reparsing the syntax tree incrementally, the programmer would directly edit the syntax tree itself. In other words, you would be working with the program's structure rather than its raw textual representation.
This approach could simplify the development of code editors. The editor would primarily need to offer a GUI for tree structure editing, which might still appear as flat text for usability but would fundamentally involve structural interactions.
Whether this approach improves the end-user experience is hard to say. It feels akin to graphical programming languages, which already have a niche (e.g., visual scripting in game engines). However, the challenge lies in the interface.
The input device (keyboard) designed for natural text input and have limitations when it comes to efficiently interacting with structural data. In theory, these hurdles could be overcome with time, but for now, the bottleneck is mostly a question of UI/UX design. And as of today, we lack a clear, efficient approach to tackle this problem.