Ask HN: What happened to code generation tools?

2 points·pawanpe··4 comments

I understand many organizations are running for including Machine/Deep learning intelligence into their products(which is good) for service, productivity and other reasons, but I do not find much updates on improving the code generation tools/products for improving productivity of an engineer. Do you know any of them that are useful?

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Lisp!

In particular lisp macros are the generic code generation tool that you can use all the time to improve your productivity.

Notice also, that you have lisp available in emacs, and that you can also use it in emacs to generate any source code. The only downside of emacs source code generation is that in general, you don't or are not allowed to keep the original emacs lisp source code (or to keep it in git), so that the level of abstraction allowed by code generation is lost. Too bad for the cow-orkers and maintainers, but at least you could generate all that code quickly and flawelessly.

Interesting point! Even the author of Hackers and Painters (Paul Graham) has specified Lisp was one of the important factors for their success at viaWeb and gave an edge over competitors. But I was expecting more user friendly (and useful) from this end for higher level languages in last decade or so... But couldn't find any perfect match!

When the languages get more flexible (think for example Java 1.3 vs Java 8) you can in many cases use the language features to build class libraries etc that replace the need for code generation.

LOL ROTF

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