Tuesday, October 28, 2008

Generic and generated - an oxymoron?

oxymoron.jpg< quick and not well thought out comment >

Last week I was at an interesting presentation.

Some developers were presenting some stuff they were doing with Eclipse EMF and CDO. This was interesting and gave me some things to ponder about ...

But thinking about it I have a big question mark:
One of the marketing-slogans I heard over and over again was in the sense of:
We are doing code-generation, but the cool thing is that it still remains totally generic!
Well, sounds cool ... but ... is generated code and generic code not quite an oxymoron?

If it is generic, why generate it? Wouldn't it be better to refactor it out in a generic component? That's the idea behind Code Generation vs. Code Synthesis.

Is it not the benefit of code-generation to generate highly specific code? Since the code can be regenerated at any time, it is no flaw to be very concrete and verbose, those LOC do not count for maintainability! (I am not the only one to oppose this kind of reasoning, but it is a common argument...)

Once more I had the feeling that I am just not getting the whole Code-Generation-Model-Driven-What-So-Ever-Movement ...

</ quick and not well thought out comment >

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