I completely disagree. Code generation is a sign that you've found a way to get the computer to do something tedious and repetitive for you, thus saving valuable programmer time and eliminating possible human error.

Some examples:

MS decided not to provide any reliable way to get stub error messages for socket errors. You can use FormatMessage() with GetLastError() (like how strerror(errno) works on Unix), but not with Winsock's WSAGetLastError(), for some reason or another. So I went to the page documenting the error codes returned by WSAGetLastError() and found each code had a short description beside it. I wrote a little Perl script that used LWP to fetch that page from the MSDN website, parse the HTML and extract each error code and error description, then generate C code for a lookup table of error strings. Problem solved.

I have a subsystem in a C library of mine that basically just encapsulates a few common structs, providing New() constructor routines, Get() and Set() accessor routines, and Destroy() destructor routines. The documentation for these routines would be quite predictable, so I wrote a Perl script that parsed the header file (which itself was automatically generated from the source file) and generated POD documentation for each routine. Now I only need to add a few additional, routine-specific bits of information here and there and it's done. Problem solved.

I wanted an XSUB interface to some C code of mine. I wrote a code generator that generated the XSUBs for me along with some special functions and CODE: and PPCODE: sections to do some neat stuff way beyond what h2xs (another code generator) is capable of producing. Time saved, problem solved. (xsubpp itself is a code generator, by the way.)

You'll probably say that I shouldn't have had to generate that lookup table, that MS should have made FormatMessage() work with WSAGetLastError(), or that C should be C++ and make encapsulating abstract data types easier, that XS ought to be more flexible, or whatever. The fact is that we don't live in a perfect world with perfect software. Stuff we use often times doesn't work or doesn't work very well, and we as developers find ourselves having to pick up the pieces.

Code generation can help with that, doing the repetitive stuff for you and saving some serious time in the process.

See The Pragmatic Programmer, page 102, for a discussion of this.

In reply to Re^2: (OT) Generated Code vs. Libraries by William G. Davis
in thread (OT) Generated Code vs. Libraries by Mutant

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