It's beginning to look as if the stc project will "succeed" in a different
way than I originally imagined :-) Indeed, it has been slowly dawning on
me that Python already *has* two superb type checkers. They are called
pylint and rope! That being so, the best way to move forward on the stc
project may be to encourage as many people as possible to flattr (or
otherwise contribute to) the developers of pylint and rope...
I'm not sure how much more time I will devote to the stc project. This
post may form the basis for a "farewell" post on the stc group. But I'll
probably continue to work on the stc project long enough to answer
questions about how rope and pylint do what they do. Make no mistake, I am
still intensely curious about rope and pylint, perhaps more so now that I
have done so much studying without gaining real understanding.
I might be a bit more embarrassed by these developments were it not that
Guido himself seems not to understood pylint and rope. Anyway, I have
enjoyed my work on stc. I have gained lots of experience with Python's
excellent (if slightly flawed) parser tools. The tricks in rope's ast.py
module are truly clever. I have been able to study TypeScript, a great
static analyzer for JavaScript.
Most importantly, I have developed several tools and techniques for
analyzing other python programs. The most important technique is the dictum,
"the only way to understand a computer program is to run it."
This dictum has lead directly to several new tools:
- An improved recursive import script in scripts.leo. This script now has
an option to create @edit nodes rather than @file nodes. While not as
clear as @file nodes, @edit nodes are a fast way of gaining access to files
for the purposes, say, of inserting calls to pdb.set_trace.
- The g.SherlockTracer class. It's amusing to see how much simpler it is
to do in Python than in C.
Having said all this, there is a sense of relief that I may soon be working
on Leo "full time". The list of good ideas worth doing seems endless. Here
are some likely improvements:
1. Integrate rope into Leo :-) I have spent the last two weeks studying
rope intensely. I may not understand rope's type inference mechanism
completely, but I do know that it works. More importantly, I have a great
deal of respect for rope's infrastructure; it provides what TypeScript
calls the "harness" that allows an editor to interact with rope, and vice
versa. Most of rope's code consists of this harness, and for good reason:
the nitty gritty details are inherently complex.
I am convinced that it will be possible to drive rope from Leo. Indeed,
Leo's outline structure may make it possible to do some things to speed up
what looks like an inherently time-consuming type inference process. This
is not a one-day, or even one-week project. But it's worth doing.
2. More flexible unit testing. Leo needs better ways of managing unit
tests in external files, and of using custom subclasses of
unittest.TestCase. At present, the Leonine idiom that substitutes for
subclassing is::
exec(g.findTestScript(c,'@common <name of common code>'))
This sorta works for all-Leo situations, but it won't work when test cases
are in separate files. I have some ideas for improvement, and some
mostly-failed experiments from the stc project. I expect some good things
to happen fairly soon.
3. There have been some interesting requests lately for improvements to
Leo. Two that come to mind are a) easier ways to execute scripts in a
separate process and b) a way to parameterize template nodes. I'd also
like easier ways to parameterize commands. I am sure that Leo's users will
continue to suggest improvements that I would never have imagined.
So that's it. I expect a period of transition away from stc. It may take
weeks or even months, but I am eager to continue to improve Leo.
Edward
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