Save Time, Generate Code

I mentioned the after party in the previous post, now is time to talk about the SDForum SAM SIG meeting "Writing Code Generators For Quality, Productivity, and Fun" by Bill Venners of Artima. In short, Bill's talk was about designing domain specific languages and using code generation to solve programming problems. Code generation can build better, more reliable code faster, particularly in situations where you find yourself doing a lot of cut and paste style .

As befits the technique, Bill got the audience to do a lot of the lifting by describing how they had solved various programming problems through code generation. I have used it a couple of times as well as some real language design, and I shared one of my experiences along with several other audience members. It was definitely encouraging to hear that many audience members had successfully used code generation.

Bill characterized a number of situations where code generation is useful and showed us a specific example of a domain specific language that he had designed. From my experience language design is comparable to API design except that there are more degrees of freedom so there are more ways to go wrong. Designing a real programming language is hard. There are issues at the lexical level, problems with keywords and extensibility, the need to make the language regular and unsurprising while dealing with special case and a thousand other little details to get right.

On the other hand, if a domain specific language can be kept simple enough, it can skirt these problems. Bill's example language was simple. Each statement consisted of a set of keywords followed by a name. In my opinion, domain specific languages are a great technique provided that you firstly design a clean simple language and secondly remember the principals of API design.