I've been working (part-time) on an existing Rails application for the last
month or so, getting comfortable with it, modifying some sections to
support needed functionality, and beginning an all-out, carpet-bombing
"shock and awe" assault on it's test suite. However, a significant portion
of the system is (or rather was, since I've already gutted a lot of it) a
chunk of rather messy and unpleasant auto-generated code.
I've always been a bit iffy about code generation tools, ever since my
first encounters with them whilst working on some $DEITY-awful access
application years ago. (First encounters with
anything Microsoft
usually have that effect on me, though). Since then, I've never found any
reason to change my mind, and dealing with this particular chunk of
auto-generated code has pushed me over the edge into "wild-eyed extremist"
territory.
Please note that when I say "code generator", I'm talking here about
programs or wizards or whatever that create a block of code that you're
then expected to tweak to suit your conditions. If it's just a mechanical
transformation of an input format to an output format, where a human is
never expected to maintain the output by hand, that's not code generation
in my book -- that's just a compiler being used for it's intended purpose.
I like compilers. I'm fairly sure you do too. Code generators, though?
EVIL.
Consider what you get out of your generator: A big blob of code in your
application that you then have to understand and maintain. It's like you
gave a commit bit to some random person who dropped a 5000 line change into
your tree and then ran away into the night, cackling.
If there's bugs in the generated code (and remember, there's
always bugs in software), when they get fixed upstream you're up
the creek unless you haven't modified the code at all (and thus can
regenerate), or you're willing to apply the necessary patches to your
modified version, often by hand. Hand-patching is error-prone, and if
you've modified the code at the same place that has to be patched, things
can get unpleasant.
In the case of the generator I'm dealing with at the moment, I'm not even
blessed with it being decent code. It's ugly code, in every possible sense
of the word. There's inconsistent formatting, poor commenting, it uses
some totally whack coding constructs[
1], the hard-coded text strings are
ungrammatical, it's got very few (and poorly covering) test cases, the
methods are huge and unwieldy, and it's got security bugs (not so hot for
something that's supposed to be guarding your application). In short, it
looks like some quick-and-dirty internal hack that escaped one night and is
now wreaking havoc on the world.
There's probably some really good code generators out there. I've been
poking around a bit, and there's some written for Rails by people who I
know produce good code. However, no matter how good the author of the code
generator is, the very best you can hope for is solid, clean code that is
the equivalent of some portion of your application having been coded by
some member of your team who you (and nobody else) has ever met, who didn't
follow your team's coding conventions, and who has never looked at any
other part of your application to make sure that everything hung together
in a consistent manner. Which you now have to maintain.
I've read a lot of books, articles, blog posts, and mailing list messages,
and participated in no shortage of "why software sucks" discussions with
other programmers, but I've
never heard anyone advocate that the
way to clean code, minimal bugs, and happy programmers was to drop a big
chunk of unknown code right in the middle of things.
Before you start charging up the e-mail-delivered tasers, ready to fry my
delicate braincells for the twin crimes of Xenocodophobia and a vicious
case of Not Invented Here syndrome, though, please understand that I'm not
against code reuse in the right place. That right place is a library,
component, or other abstract, documented, fairly static, and
presumably-replaceable chunk of code. By using a library, you get a
relatively simple interface to somebody else's complexity. This is a good
thing, for all the reasons that everyone should already be able to recite.
Items such as a comprehensible interface, minimal learning curve, and so
on. Things you don't get with generated code because, pretty much by
definition, the entire chunk of code is you "interface".
There are some times, though, when what you want to do can't be done in a
library. Either the thing has too many tentacles to be able to easily
encapsulate behind an abstracted interface, or you need to modify it's
behaviour in too many places to be able to get away with a few simple
callbacks to get the job done. Hence, it might be tempting to fire up the
code generator to get yourself out of a hole quickly.
Don't do it though. Don't succumb to the temptation of saving yourself a
little bit of time by firing up a code generator. What you're doing there
is just making pain for yourself, by inheriting a big chunk of code that
you don't fully understand, probably doesn't solve your problem
particularly well, and which you (or whichever poor slob gets the job after
you) will have to maintain into perpetuity -- most likely by gradually
rewriting large pieces of it so that it fits your application better.
The output of a code generator is likely to be the least maintainable code
in your tree -- either by virtue of the fact that it's crap code, or at the
very least because you just don't understand it. The general principle of
good codebase hygiene is that you get rid of unmaintainable code quickly,
so it doesn't infect everything else (a la the "broken window theory").
With that in mind, why would you ever consider deliberately introducing a
huge chunk of unmaintainable code into your application?
The closest I can come to a defence of code generators is something like
Rails' scaffolding, where the controller and views for a set of simple CRUD
operations on a table are auto-generated. The key word there, though, is
scaffolding. It's very name suggests that it's temporary, to be
replaced with something more robust and useful as soon as is reasonable.
The default scaffolding is ugly as sin, besides, which encourages you to
replace it, and -- as of Rails 1.1 (I think), there's a 'scaffold' method
which creates the scaffolding output at runtime, so you never, ever need to
generate scaffolding code any more.
Anyone planning on producing any significant piece of their application
through the use of code generators is, in my book, committing a crime
against software decency.
1. My favourite whack code
construct thus far has been this gem:
case somevar
when 17
do_something_here()
end
Because, you know,
if statements are for people who know how to
program, or something.
just kidding...
I’ll also have to miss the warm up days of