I was really excited about the concept and read some papers on it at the time. Then I ran a real world application of it, and writing code in it was just a bad experience.

I think I didn't explain the gradual typing properly. I mean the broader concept of moving developers from one way of doing things to another.

When the vast majority of people and tools are working a certain way. Introducing a whole new thing that requires them to work a whole different way is a hard sell.

So having a way for people to move gradually from point A to point B at their own pace and pick up benefits along the way is really nice.

One example of this is Typescript with gradual typing. Swapping form js to typescript is fairly easy. You can still use your old tools and over time you can start to adapt new features into your code, and over time everyone gets used to this new stricter/better approach.

I think ast based code like this essentially requires you to throw out everything all at once, not just editor, but literally everyone's workflow today and rebuild from the ground up.

I just don't think it will ever be more than a niche thing unless it can loosen up on strictness and play nice with existing tooling.