Navigating codebases of any meaningful size is difficult. Most of a programmer’s time is spent jumping through the codebase, reading or skimming to build a mental model of the constructs and conventions within it. These constructs — among them: the DSLs, interfaces, and taxonomy of types that exist — are arguably the most important precursor to understanding where and how to make changes. But these constructs only exist in programmers’ heads. It’s difficult or impossible to navigate most codebases through the lens of those constructs; programmers lack “code browsers” that present the underlying code independently of files and the filesystem hierarchy. Yet code browsers that can do so — and we’ll look at some examples below — would be incredibly useful. This is because instances of these constructs can be thought of as records in a database, albeit an ad-hoc, poorly-specified database that can only be queried through carefully-crafted regexes1.

In simple cases, some constructs manifest as naming conventions: prefixes in a name may be a rudimentary way to namespace classes2, while suffixes may be a rudimentary way to group classes or identify their type3. But these are easy examples; many patterns are much more subtle.

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