i'll never understand what issue people have with code generation if the code is properly formatted. no runtime magic to debug. it's all there to read, which is a damn nice feature imho.

@bonifartius And another problem is that generated code is often hard to understand how it hangs together, i.e. "what do I need to do to X" is black magic rather than the excruciating pain of learning how that should be done. What you save in work, you lose in learning.

@niclas yeah, the generated code has to be sensible of course. this isn't often the case, but that's not a problem of codegen but by the generating tools writing out a mess :)

i think an easy way to deal with manual changes for generated code is - if the generated code permits that - to use subclasses (or whatever serves that purpose) with the generated ones as superclass.

in any case, i don't think that generated code is worse to debug than magic runtime stuff like SQL-query builders etc. :)

@bonifartius Everything can be made very bad, but it seems (to me) that code generators (incl my own) are extra prone to making life worse.

And if you put the generated code in the superclass(es), then why not create those manually as a solid abstraction, designed for inheritance (also not trivial).

In general, the problem isn't technology, the problem is people. Solving "people problems" with "technology solutions" is what we programmers do, and equally perplexed when it didn't help.

@niclas
> Everything can be made very bad, but it seems (to me) that code generators (incl my own) are extra prone to making life worse.

they certainly have to be build with great care :)

> And if you put the generated code in the superclass(es), then why not create those manually as a solid abstraction, designed for inheritance (also not trivial).

as you've written, manually writing things sometimes just isn't feasible. if one ends up doing a lot c&p, codegen is the cleaner solution imho.

> In general, the problem isn't technology, the problem is people. Solving "people problems" with "technology solutions" is what we programmers do, and equally perplexed when it didn't help.

agreed!

@bonifartius @niclas codegen is the least hateful, most expressive, and often most efficient (in terms of both man-hours and cycles) way of solving many different problems in a wide variety of programming languages. more than anything this is an indictment of those programming languages, and why i like languages like Terra and Scheme so much -- you can do all your metaprogramming natively. consider some of the crazy shit i pulled writing parsav:

https://c.hale.su/parsav/file?name=tpl.t&ci=tip (which compiles things like https://c.hale.su/parsav/file?name=view/compose.tpl&ci=tip into machine code when the program is built)
https://c.hale.su/parsav/file?name=render/docpage.t&ci=tip

@velartrill @bonifartius Yeah, one could argue that every compiler is a code generator. But I think the problem is when a human expected to modify the generated code, which is often the case/goal.