I am not worthy

Some of the people who read this blog are amongst the cleverest, most productive and influential programmers and technical authors in the world. This, despite the fact that I am an utter fool, obsessed with toilet humour and cheap satire. I am utterly bewildered at how fortunate I am to have the ear of such industry legends as Kathleen Dollard, Julia Lerman and Mike Gunderloy, amongst others.

I was so blown away, just now when I found a comment from Kathleen Dollard that I burnt the meal I was half-way through cooking. The long suffering Mrs. Secret Geek was less than impressed, but ultimately sympathetic.

Kathleen, in case you don't know, is the author of 'Code Generation in Microsoft .NET', a topic which I am right behind, even though I confess to not having seen the book personally. On her site she uses a lord of the rings metaphor to explain the importance of Code Generation:

"...line by line code creation [is] the Ring of Doom we've all been dragging around. In spite of all our brilliant technological advances, we still write code the same way we did 20 years ago - line by line in an editor. The ring is our blindness to recognizing this legacy because we can't see past the need get that next line of code written."

I couldn't agree more. As my boss, Bill Murphy, always says:

'you simply cannot be profitable in this business unless you can automatically generate the basic maintenance programs that we find ourselves writing again and again, year after year.'

The company I work for spends a lot of time getting code generation right. It can be a frustrating purpose, writing or fixing templates when you'd rather be writing or fixing code. But the economics are a no-brainer.

Here's to code generation!

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