miniblog.

Implementation chicken: When there's an obvious feature gap in an ecosystem and everyone is waiting for someone else to write it. I see this most frequently with OSS toolchains. Basic functionality in new programming languages is another common scenario.

I had a third attempt at porting difftastic from Dijkstra to A*, and I've eventually concluded that A* just isn't worth it for the implementation complexity. I had fun writing it up though, and I've even attempted ASCII art for building intuitions:

It's confusing how 'REPL' refers to two different UIs: A CLI like IPython or Julia, where things like multiline editing and syntax highlighting need careful implementation. An editor protocol like SLIME or CIDER where multiline editing is a total non-issue.