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soartech / soar-language-server

Language Server for the Soar Language
BSD 3-Clause "New" or "Revised" License
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Interest in datamap library? #791

Open garfieldnate opened 1 year ago

garfieldnate commented 1 year ago

Hi, I opened an idea ticket over on the VisualSoar repo: https://github.com/SoarGroup/VisualSoar/issues/6. I was wondering if the maintainers of this project had any interest in this? The idea being that if we could extract the datamap functionality from VisualSoar as a library of some kind, it could potentially be integrated directly into the Soar LSP. I don't see any mentions of datamaps in this repo, so I assumed the functionality was not (yet) supported here. Could be a very useful productivity boost for folks using the LSP.

I'm just trying to drum up/gauge interest in it. There's no budgeting or plans for such a project, but it might be an interesting area to collaborate on if we can get stakeholders interested.

marinier commented 1 year ago

Thanks for bringing this to our attention. I'd say that in principle we'd be interested in this, but practically this code base is unmaintained.

You are correct that there is no datamap support in this project. There isn't much interest in the datamap at SoarTech, although it may be that this is more because of how terrible the UI for it is in VisualSoar than because it isn't useful. But given that combined with the difficulty, it wasn't considered a priority. If it were easy to incorporate via a library, that could change the calculus. I think the challenging part would be coming up with a better UI -- I'm thinking it would probably be better to do something text-based vs. graphical, but I haven't thought it through. (I know the datamap has a text representation, but it's not really geared towards human authorability.)

Part of the reason this codebase is unmaintained is that it hasn't really needed maintenance -- it does its intended function (which is mostly centered around Tcl support) pretty well, and given limited resources we've chosen to spend them elsewhere (like on jsoar). But I could see incorporating something like this being a good project if the opportunity to work on it arises. (Of course, this code base is open source, so if someone outside of SoarTech wants to contribute, that is always welcome.)

garfieldnate commented 1 year ago

Thanks for the quick response! I haven't looked at the datamap format in a while, but there is another ticket related to making the format more amenable to collaboration on Git (https://github.com/SoarGroup/VisualSoar/issues/5). I guess that should be prioritized over this one.