While I sympathize with russ, I simply have to agree with you. Automatic code generation off of a data structure is a very powerful idea. In fact one of the nice things about Perl is how easy it makes this to do.

Anyone who disagrees should simply stop and think about the process of pulling data out of a database and spitting out formatted HTML...

EDIT
I thought about it and an even better example would be something like Parse::RecDescent. Pass it a string description of a grammar. It generates a parser for you. An example of automatic code generation of Perl in Perl which has been recommended several times by the likes of merlyn.

So while I absolutely think that a lot of code generation tools are abysmal, code generation (even generation of Perl) is a concept that should not be categorically thrown away.