However I’d add that this job could easily be done by the IDE. For a reason that I fail to grasp, after being around for multiple decades, IDEs are still incredibly bad at presenting useful information on the code. Apart from coloration and more recently type hints, there never have been any real innovation in just helping reading code structure. For some reason we are still stuck with a tree of files besides some glorified text editor.
Interestingly, we have made incredible progress into code comprehension. We have incredibly mature ast parsers, lsp servers, … our IDEs know everything about our code structure but we still fail to make anything else with that data than autocompletion and doc popups.
It’s called “sticky scroll” in VSCode and Visual Studio [1]. It pins the opening line of a scope to the top when it scrolls out of view and it does it multiple levels deep so you can see the class, function definition, conditionals, etc at the top of the source file when browsing deeply nested code.
There is some great work being done here - I'm watching GToolkit advances, and while I don't fully buy the "moldable" hype, the UX of reading and writing code in GT feels like sci-fi sometimes.
However I’d add that this job could easily be done by the IDE. For a reason that I fail to grasp, after being around for multiple decades, IDEs are still incredibly bad at presenting useful information on the code. Apart from coloration and more recently type hints, there never have been any real innovation in just helping reading code structure. For some reason we are still stuck with a tree of files besides some glorified text editor.
Interestingly, we have made incredible progress into code comprehension. We have incredibly mature ast parsers, lsp servers, … our IDEs know everything about our code structure but we still fail to make anything else with that data than autocompletion and doc popups.