
Ask HN: Large scale mapping of JavaScript in the wild? - zachrose
Is there anybody crawling the web for JavaScript files and looking at metrics or patterns in the way that lexicographers might study a corpus of natural language?
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sova
Not to my knowledge but that sounds interesting. I think that there is
probably a lot of "valid code" that is not necessarily legible to human eyes.
Javascript is also rather open in its potential.... Would you be looking at
the statistics for how variables are named, or more for the style and format
of method/function calls and such?

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zachrose
It's only a whim so far, but I think I'd be interested in looking for patterns
in ASTs. If you can imagine scraping all the javascript off of a bunch of
websites, I'd expect to see something like genotypes of jQuery emerge, with
detectable shifts for different versions or builds.

If you were looking at JavaScript projects on npm/Github, I'd be interested
seeing if projects and authors have a consistent style that's visible at the
AST level. If so, would it be possible describe or classify that style in a
way that enables finding more work by the same author?

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brak1
Not really what you are looking for, but if you wanted to research it
yourself, something like
[https://nerdydata.com/search](https://nerdydata.com/search) might be handy
for you...

