this is great! i’ve been thinking about exactly this (though styled after Logseq rather than Obsidian) but not gotten as far as implementing anything. that being said, the thing i haven’t been able to convince myself of yet is why these are different to just normal (in-line) functions? as in, why should i have to write [[foo]]: would it not be better to have all identifiers automatically linked?
As a language-agnostic thing, I suppose you need to prevent the machinery from pulling in keywords and variable names accidentally (or the insides of strings or comments). I like the idea (also a fan of Unison's approach to code-in-the-db), but I worry about the potential issues that come from effectively having a single global namespace. Could be that I just don't have the discipline for it, though.
Exactly. But zacgarby's right that you would want some auto-linking, so this is where language-specific plugins come in.
The difference from today's world would be that those plugins would leave their results explicitly serialized in the source medium, so they wouldn't have to keep being reconstructed by every other tool.
> I like the idea (also a fan of Unison's approach to code-in-the-db), but I worry about the potential issues that come from effectively having a single global namespace. Could be that I just don't have the discipline for it, though.
I have lots of thoughts on this. I was initially disappointed that Unison kept a unique hierarchy to organize their code-- that seems so filesystem-ey and 1990s.
However, I'm now a convert. The result of combining a unique hierarchy with explicit links between nodes is a 'compound graph' (or a 'cluster graph', depending, getting the language from https://rtsys.informatik.uni-kiel.de/~biblio/downloads/these...). These are very respectable data structures! One thing they're good for is being able to always give a canonical title to a node, but varying what that title is depending on the situation.
I think that for serious work the linearizer would want to copy this strategy as well. Right now it's flat because that's all I need for my website, but if you were doing big projects in it you'd want to follow Unison and have a hierarchy. In the `HashMap` folder you'd display `HashMap.get` with a link alias that shows plain `get`, but if that function is being called from some other folder it would appear as the full `HashMap.get`.
You could still do all the other cool stuff like organize by tags and attributes using frontmatter, but for the particular purpose of display names having a global hierarchy is useful.
EDIT: What matters more than what the linearizer does is what Obsidian displays, so it's there that the "take relative hierarchical position into account when showing links" logic would have to occur. That could be a plugin or maybe Obsidian's relative link feature, I haven't used the latter.