language server integration - scope

[alefminus]

Hi,

What would your thoughts be about refactors - things like variable renaming, function extraction (cell extraction?) - would these be in scope for the project? I expect you would want to use a "LSP<->Backend<->Frontend" architecture? Would you like to support totally external edits to the notebook in the same way you currently support reloading a changed module?

Slightly related - do you think a self editing API would be a good thing? i.e. have a notebook produce/mutate cells in the notebook? Of course the DAG would have to somehow ignore these, creating a sort of two level of cells. I was thinking just having notebook A produce notebook B, with the aforementioned feature of reloading a notebook when it was updated, would supply almost the same behavior, in a much easier to reason about way.

Alon