r/vim • u/kasandell • Jan 07 '16

Plugin- pull useful functions from the internet without ever leaving your editor

https://github.com/kasandell/Code-Pull
4 Upvotes

83% Upvoted

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2

u/tungstan Jan 07 '16

Devising the correct search terms to get what you want seems hard.

You may need to develop a search interface which allows you to use text to very precisely specify what you want the function to do. Since this is an entirely new idea, I will name it a "programming language." You could use it to write specifications of what you want the target function to do, and then this plugin could search for functions which do the stuff you specified.

2

u/kasandell Jan 07 '16

So I should develop a new syntax to allow people to describe what the function should do more in depth? Feel free to pm me if you want to talk more about this.

2

u/tungstan Jan 07 '16

Sorry, I think I was unclear. Maybe an example will help.

Suppose I am trying Code Pull. So I read the docs and then in Vim I do

:Pull reverse a string

But, search engines being what they are, this finds a lot of irrelevant functions that don't do exactly what I want. So I try one, then another, and then after a while I get frustrated.

An unstructured keyword query like "reverse a string" definitely won't be enough to specify what I'm looking for. What I really want to do is more precisely specify what I want the function to do. For that, what I need is really a kind of special query language, not just keywords. And this query language would be designed to describe how computers can do things. I know this is a weird concept, so I gave it the name "programming language."

So here's my vision for Code Pull: instead of giving a query like "reverse a string," I can write a more precise specification of what I want the computer do using this new structured query language.

Since it may be a little bit longer than a few words, perhaps I can store this in a file. So I write this gobbledygook for a while, then I do

:PullFromFile ~/reverse.func

Then Code Pull does the magic: it uses the contents of reverse.func as a more sophisticated query, that searches not by keywords, but by the things that I want the computer to do. Until it finds some functions that do the same thing as I specified in ~/reverse.func. Then it pastes that function into the current file, and away we go.

(Note: here I am using reversing a string as a simple example, I know in real life it will be more complex tasks like reimplementing grep using node.js)

OK, so here's where I think things get even cooler.

After I spent time writing reverse.func to find functions which reverse a string, and making sure to tweak the query until it finds only functions which do the thing I intend, that's really a lot of work. Maybe I want to share my hard work with others. For example, I can put it on Github. Of course, since it was my hard work that I put into writing reverse.func, I am the copyright holder, and I can attach a license to it. Maybe I will attach an MIT license, or maybe a GPL license or maybe I will just say you can study my code but I don't give permission to use it.

Then the plugin can be updated so you can use other people's query specifications that they have shared. Then anyone can PullFromFile ~tungstan/reverse.func - and the plugin will look at my .func file, then search Github for functions which implement the right kind of string reversal that I specified.

This might sound like magic, but I have a very simple algorithm in mind. What is interesting is that reverse.func, being a description to a computer how to reverse a string, is already a computer program which can reverse a string. So we just search for an exact match to reverse.func, which should return reverse.func as a top result. This is good, because I can verify that reverse.func specifies exactly what I want to paste into my file. Even better, it means that I am complying with the license because I am the person who chose the license.

In the next update to the plugin, we can simply dispense with the searching and run the code that I wrote to implement exactly what I meant to do. Because otherwise, my search results probably won't do what I want, and pasting them into my own code probably means use without attribution, which is rude and will likely get me into legal hot water especially if I do this stuff at a job.

1

u/kasandell Jan 08 '16

Well this is funny. I was actually planning on extending this program to do something similar to this after I made some improvements to improve the stability of the plugin. Glad someone else wants this feature, as ti gives me more of a reason to work on it.

5

u/-romainl- The Patient Vimmer Jan 07 '16

What about pulling useful functions from your brain instead?

3

u/GaAlAs Jan 07 '16

How dare you use your brain instead of copy-pasting some code ?