DEV Community

Discussion on: Write Code That Writes Code

Collapse
 
davehoran profile image
Dave Horan

Ironically, you mention that it would not be needed much with COBOL. In the early 80s when I was a teen, I used code generators all the time to create basic CRUD file maintenance programs that I would then modify for specific business logic. Since just the pre-modidied code was like 40 printed pages long (days of for matrix) it was crazy to write all that by hand. Manual typing errors alone could add days to debugging. The code generators guarantee some level of code consistency and quality, so you knew any problems introduced were from the additional manual code you added.

This is why I like a lot of the CLI tools for various frameworks that will generate the basic boilerplate for a component, model, etc for your app.

Metaprogramming has been around a long time thanks to 'lazy' (aka smart) developers leveraging DYI mindsets.