ElixirConf 2022 - Onorio Catenacci - Searching Your Elixir Code

I love that you covered Rosie @Onor.io; I was at the exact same talk in 2018! At the time it was still in its infancy but now I’m going to look more into it for Elixir! I wonder how its 2.0 milestone is going.

I’m only just finding this talk, because I was considering drafting a similar talk using a similar tool called Comby. As a tool it seems more focused on the “find and replace” use case. Here are some talks by the main developer, who I believe is now employed at Sourcegraph:

Sorry I wasn’t able to respond earlier. I’ve been a bit swamped the past couple of days. Yes I would dearly love to see more people learning about Rosie. The last I spoke with Dr. Jennings, I think she said that 2.0 is probably on track for later this year (2024) or early next year. It’ll be very cool when it’s available.

I’ll definitely watch these videos. Last I used comby – about 13-15 months ago – it was fairly underwhelming for looking for code patterns though.

Nowadays I found ast-grep to be much better.

I was telling someone just the other day that I think of RegEx like I think of assembly language. Extremely powerful, very low-level and easy to get wrong because you forget to specify something. This is why I’m hoping that tools like Rosie Pattern Language gain some traction. Just as higher level languages (even C) helped us to be more productive with less errors, I think higher level parsing via Rosie and other tools would help us to be more productive as well!

Oh absolutely. And let’s not underestimate Tree Sitter (which ast-grep steps on). When you have actual ability to match and replace code regardless of whitespace, then pretty nice things start to happen!