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Code-Writing’s Days Numbered


Caught the link via DataGrid Girl, to an article about why Code Generators are, by and large, superior to handcoding.

People who do not understand that code generation is the future will be the first who will not be able to keep up with the rest who do”

Code-Writing’s Days Numbered by Frans Bouma

Great article. By and large I agree. There are times to write code by hand, but I see no reason to “sweat the small stuff” as it were. This quote sums it up quite nicely:

I really feel sorry for those people who do not understand what power code generation really has. They are doomed to do boring work which can be done by computers in a fraction of the time without any error. Or does the author of that visionary article think he can program a DAL + BL facade tier-set for an application which has 100-s of tables, without errors?

I don’t think it’ll be for quite awhile, but I do believe that by and large, the days of spending 90% of your time writing original code are over.

This entry was posted on Monday, July 7th, 2003, 6:31 pm and is filed under IT Thoughts. You can follow any responses to this entry through RSS 2.0. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

  1. #1 by Cheah Chu Yeow - July 8th, 2003 at 21:28

    I followed the chain of links before I realised that it’s .NET we’re talking about.

    Frans Bouma puts it very nicely: “Good tools help the user, so a good generator will help the user of that generator. It should be: which generator will I use?, and not: shall I use a generator or not?,”

    In any case, in general, code generators are useful only if they do what you want. I’d use a code generator over coding by hand anyday, when the tool is good - in fact, programming EJBs practically calls for automatic code generation to remove the tedium of coding the various interfaces and there are some mighty good code generators out there (Middlegen, IDEs like JBuilder and IDEA).

  2. #2 by Cheah Chu Yeow - July 8th, 2003 at 21:30

    Quote: “but I do believe that by and large, the days of spending 90% of your time writing original code are over.”

    The days writing original code should never be diminished - in fact, I think you meant the time spent writing _unoriginal_, repetitive code should be numbered. :)

  3. #3 by Jeremy C. Wright - July 8th, 2003 at 22:44

    Mmm, perhaps I meant the amount of original code that goes into a project (original being hand-written) :)
    I know that we tend to code entire apps to help us do repetitive things, and we have a whole load of custom controls (.NET).

  4. #4 by Calbert - April 14th, 2004 at 14:11

    I am working with some body who have developed a automated coding system that will also generate code from an algorithm design given in a flowchart. The system will generate code for non-repetative system also. There are free sample download for the BASIC language at the web site: http://www.logiccoder.biz.

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