> Imagine a program somewhat like go-fmt(1), that would run on checkout of a source repo, to transform a base-level AST into the syntactic representation of your choice, and pattern-match-decompile any higher-level structures into the macro-statements in your chosen language that would generate them[1].
People have been imagining this for a long time, and realistically it isn't even all that hard to do. But the result of this would, honestly, probably be about as useful as running Shakespeare through google translate to Chinese and back again [1]. Code is communication, and like all communication it has nuance.
It is absolutely not clear that programming as we understand it, without a massive paradigm shift in the entire field, can really work with all that nuance stripped out.
People have been imagining this for a long time, and realistically it isn't even all that hard to do. But the result of this would, honestly, probably be about as useful as running Shakespeare through google translate to Chinese and back again [1]. Code is communication, and like all communication it has nuance.
It is absolutely not clear that programming as we understand it, without a massive paradigm shift in the entire field, can really work with all that nuance stripped out.
[1] https://translate.google.ca/?ie=UTF-8&hl=en&client=tw-ob#zh-...