I remember many years ago an akin experience, talking to John Brant and Don Roberts who had done the original refactoring browser in Smalltalk. Java was on its meteoric rise with tons of effort being dumped into Eclipse. They, and others with them, were eager to port these techniques to eclipse, and the theory was they’d be able to do even more because of they typing. But Brant/Roberts that surprisingly it has been more difficult. Part of the problem was the AST. Java, while typed, had a complex AST (many node types), compared to that of Smalltalk (late/runtime typed) which had a very simple/minimal AST. It was in interesting insight.