Future of Coding is an online community with a welcoming, cooperative, and revolutionary spirit. We are unified in the belief that the common practice of programming is tragically less humane than it could be.

Future of Coding

Jonathan Edwards and Tomáš Petříček on Managed Copy &amp; Paste

&gt; We propose managed copy &amp; paste, in which the programming environment records copy &amp; paste operations, along with structural edit operations, so that it can track the differences between copies and reconcile them on command.
<https://www.subtext-lang.org/PAINT22.pdf>

IIRC Toby Schachman adapted "managed copy &amp; paste" from Edwards' earlier Subtext work into <http://aprt.us/|Apparatus>, where it forms the basis of Apparatus's component / cloning system. I was fascinated when I discovered it there, and have always thought it had enormous potential. Very exciting to see it being revisited!

This reminded me of a rant by Ted Nelson on the versatility of physical paper-and-glue cutting and pasting (<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dOLXLk8TbxQ&amp;t=509s>), where he lays the blame on Larry Tesler for the state of things today. The progress lately towards structured editing seems promising, between this and things like Hazel - hopefully one can break into the real world soon!

What happens when you edit across a boundary of a managed paste?

Good question. This is essentially AST editing, so edits are either inside a subtree or not