Looks similar to how mathematica works, there you also type \sum <tab> and it will transform into the mathematical sum symbol and guide you to what should be filled in next with empty boxes. Really cool that they managed do generalize this and make it available for developers.
I'm mostly worried about copy-paste becoming troublesome, one of the biggest advantages of text editing is that it's so raw and if you know your tools you can transform a lot of it quickly instead of being constrained to repetetive clicking through clunky wizards and menus with your mouse.
I think this could be the future. Some tools (like Emacs' Paredit) are trying to do things like this with text but I think projectional editing is a better solution.
The problem is that it will take some kind of miracle or great revolution for it to ever have a place in our workflows.
Rather, 'under the hood' it _is_ a lisp (that is, an AST). The powerful feature here is that you visualize (project) the AST into a more concise representation
If a JavaScript dev likes the idea of AST refactoring, I recommend a look into grasp[]. It's like grep but works with the AST representation of a file instead of the Text.
The point of the idea is, if you combined meta-programming and DSLs with Java, you don't have Java anymore. MPS calls their Java dialect "baseLanguage" and it's actually Java + a lot of small DSLs with custom renderings and editors.
MPS is one of the most mind blowing developer projects I ever encountered. But I first played with it years ago and have tried most versions since, and unfortunately it never made it past the "cool, neat, but I don't have a use for it" stage. Somehow I always end up back with regular IntelliJ and Java or Kotlin.
One reason: MPS is one of those concepts that's just such a huge leap over what we do today, I worry about losing other possible contributors if I use it. Also, for example, the projects are stored as giant XML files on disk, so github diff viewers and other text based tools wouldn't work. Perhaps I should just take the leap for a small personal project.
I know what you mean. Somewhere, out there, we'll find an MBA-type, trying to paste an Excel spreadsheet into one of those tabular data types, and a black hole will open up and swallow the Earth whole.
I'm mostly worried about copy-paste becoming troublesome, one of the biggest advantages of text editing is that it's so raw and if you know your tools you can transform a lot of it quickly instead of being constrained to repetetive clicking through clunky wizards and menus with your mouse.