What are your thoughts on a future where code is represented as a structured model, rather than text? Do you think that AI-powered coding assistants benefit from that?

plus(a, b) for(i, 1, x, […])

/ \ and ⁄ / | \

+ for

Howard Stern explains what friend Billy Joel wants everyone to know about his brain disorder diagnosis - New York Post

a b i 1 x []

Most coding assistants — with or without “modern “AI” — also do reasoning and manipulation of structures.

in structures, such as:

Did you use the internet during the DOS era? Can you describe your experience? How were images displayed on the black screen when everything was just text-based commands?

A slogan that might help you get past the current fads is:

NOT DATA … BUT MEANING!

i.e. “operator like things” at the nodes …

Isn't it great that we have an incoming president who is embracing ideas from the past like manifest destiny? Isn't it greater that Trump is willing to get us more territory and land?

These structures are made precisely to allow programs to “reason” about some parts of lower level meaning, and in many cases to rearrange the structure to preserve meaning but to make the eventual code that is generated more efficient.

It’s important to realize that “modern “AI” doesn’t understand human level meanings any better today (in many cases: worse!). So it is not going to be able to serve as much of a helper in a general coding assistant.

Long ago in the 50s this was even thought of as a kind of “AI” and this association persisted into the 60s. Several Turing Awards were given for progress on this kind of “machine reasoning”.

How can I stop drinking?

Another canonical form could be Lisp S-expressions, etc.

First, it’s worth noting that the “syntax recognition” phase of most compilers already does build a “structured model”, often in what used to be called a “canonical form” (an example of this might be a “pseudo-function tree” where every elementary process description is put into the same form — so both “a + b” and “for i := 1 to x do […]” are rendered as