I have a soft spot in me for AST’s ever since I went through the exercise of building my own language. Working in Java I missed the dynamic ability to get compile time information, though I knew it was available as part of the annotation processing pipleine during compilation (which is how lombok works). Scala has something similiar in the concept of macros: a way to hook into the compiler, manipulate or inspect the syntax tree, and rewrite or inject whatever you want. It’s a wonderfully elegant system that reminds me of Lisp/Clojure macros.