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Inflex (https://inflex.io/) does this bidirectional editing: you can edit any data structure as either a graphical object or the associated code, and the other one updates appropriately. (See e.g. https://discourse.inflex.io/t/how-to-make-and-access-a-recor...)

As for the problem of which things of a data frame are generated from a formula and which are from normal form, Inflex compares the structure with the AST of the source, making it easy to tell that [{foo: ...}] are normal form and so editable graphically, whereas xs.filter(..) is not. The neat thing is you can still edit formulae that are deep within a normal form nested structure.

It helps that Inflex doesn’t have syntactic sugar, what’s parsed is what is in the final AST. It also has a symbolic evaluator, somewhat, so it’s fine to have a list of functions for example and edit the list. The evaluator produces the same AST, rather than an alien format.

This bidirectionality also applies to rich text editors. (https://mobile.twitter.com/InflexHQ/status/14923564133263360...)

Mito has the advantage of being a familiar language and ecosystem, but Python itself has a traditional runtime, it’s imperative and not expression oriented, and lacks sound static type information, so it’s inherently more difficult to achieve some things with it that are easier with a typed pure functional language, especially a custom one.



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