On 2 January 2013 22:17, Colin Putney <colin at wiresong.com> wrote:
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> On Wed, Jan 2, 2013 at 4:18 PM, Frank Shearar <frank.shearar at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>>
>> http://blog.datomic.com/2012/10/codeq.html
>>
>> Executive summary:
>> * Git gives version control over files
>> * Clojure code typically has lots of functions or other chunks of code
>> in one file
>> * This means you can't ask for the version of a single unit of code
>> * Static analyses over the files as they vary through time, dumped
>> into a database, yields interesting stuff
>>
>> What they're calling "codeqs" ("code quantum") filetree folks would
>> call a file, because filetree already splits everything (I think?)
>> into bits, and versions everything at the "codeq" level by virtue of
>> storing each bit in its own file: class definition, comment, method
>> definition, etc.
>>
>> So we already have most of this stuff already - I couldn't live
>> without my in-image method versions - but I'm wondering if anyone else
>> can spot anything worth copying?
>
>
> Nah. They're basically figuring out how to extract the semantic changes from
> git, since git just treats the source code as opaque text. That gets them to
> what Monticello has now. I guess there's a bit of "imagine what you could do
> then!" that's unspecified.
>
> Which is not to say that it's a bad idea. I'd love to create a huge database
> of, say, the update stream going back to the beginning, or the entire
> contents of squeaksource. But... then what?
>
> Things that spring to mind immediately:
>
> - universal senders and implementors
> - metrics like message sends per method or methods per class
> - detection of package dependencies
> - analysis of how long-lived packages change over time
> - analysis of contribution and collaboration between coders
>
> and so on.
>
> But, what good is it? Might be interesting, maybe there's some research
> papers to be written, but would it do us any good as a community? Would
> there be useful tools that came out of it? Would it be worth the effort?
> Hard to say.

I eventually remembered the paper I'd recently read:
http://scg.unibe.ch/archive/papers/Rob12aAPIDeprecations.pdf "How Do
Developers React to API Deprecation? The Case of a Smalltalk
Ecosystem" looks at how APIs change and how developers react to same,
and it mines SS for its data.

Hopefully, research papers _would_ benefit the community. (In other
words, they'd hopefully be research papers into things that were
useful, or that enabled useful things.)

frank

> Colin
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