Friday, November 26, 2004
Is Writing Code Stupid?
Ian Wij thinks writing code is stupid and believes that the solution is code-generation from software requirements. While many of his points about the current state of software development are true, I think Ian's solution is flawed except for very simple applications where performance doesn't matter.
Ian's approach would be to "model requirements that are consumed by an extensible code generation platform to produce the final application". Sounds good but the requirements that I've worked with aren't in a rigorous form that could be consumed by any sort of code generation tools. Rewriting requirements so that they were crisp enough for generation tools just sounds like another form of programming. And with less control over the results. In Ian's elaboration of his approach he says that "Where it isn't cost effective to model and generate, write components that get weaved into the generated code and called at the appropriate points." So he's giving himself an out when all of the code can't be generated from the requirements but it sounds like hand waving to me. To quote H. L. Mencken, "For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong".
Ian's approach would be to "model requirements that are consumed by an extensible code generation platform to produce the final application". Sounds good but the requirements that I've worked with aren't in a rigorous form that could be consumed by any sort of code generation tools. Rewriting requirements so that they were crisp enough for generation tools just sounds like another form of programming. And with less control over the results. In Ian's elaboration of his approach he says that "Where it isn't cost effective to model and generate, write components that get weaved into the generated code and called at the appropriate points." So he's giving himself an out when all of the code can't be generated from the requirements but it sounds like hand waving to me. To quote H. L. Mencken, "For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong".
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