Whenever I do Clojure, something that can get difficult when working with multiple people is how the parentheses/brackets/braces stack up, especially when everyone seems to have different opinions on how that works. As a result, if you're not careful, when there's a merge conflict you can have a ton of extra parentheses, which can be irritating to debug.
Obviously this is at some level an issue inherent to Lisps (and to be clear, I love Lisps, and these small headaches are worth it), but I think problems like that could be reduced if our source controls were aware of the ASTs.
Git can use an external tool for merging, so there could be eg a Clojure merge plugin even now. Apparently there are some commercial merge tools that Java programmers use for this like SemanticMerge. After all you hit the similar curly braces merge problems with other languages.
Yeah, I've long thought a diff tool that works on s-exprs instead of lines would be invaluable for Lisp programming. It doesn't seem like it would be too hard to write, either, although getting GitHub etc to use it seems like it would be its own challenge...
Whenever I do Clojure, something that can get difficult when working with multiple people is how the parentheses/brackets/braces stack up, especially when everyone seems to have different opinions on how that works. As a result, if you're not careful, when there's a merge conflict you can have a ton of extra parentheses, which can be irritating to debug.
Obviously this is at some level an issue inherent to Lisps (and to be clear, I love Lisps, and these small headaches are worth it), but I think problems like that could be reduced if our source controls were aware of the ASTs.