Agreed. It’s really shit for new code, but if I’m writing glue code stuff or repetitive code it saves a lot of time spent on typing.

My point is sematics.

You can style your whole webpage with divs, but using main, nav, footer or whatever blocks is semantically more correct, because you group elements together that have a certain purpose.

A HTML Tag in the middle of a sentence is not wrong per se, but when parsing it a line break could signify two sentences where one has missing punctuation, instead of a complete sentence as your original intention was.

I don’t really care how the design you want is achieved to be honest, but I don’t get why the prof didn’t argue against.

Oh boy.

We had a class in the first semester of uni where we had to create a static html page based on a screenshot.

There was this one textbox at the top of the site, where the only way you could recreate the screenshot was by using a <br/> in the middle of the text.

The prof was very picky about your HTML being semantically thorough and correct, so that was super weird that that was necessary.

100% that.

Especially that working software over comprehensive documentation part, which can be automated so easily if done right.

There’s so much value in TDD and providing a way to do integration and automated UI tests early on in a project, yet none of the companies I’ve worked at made use of it.

Also automated documentation tools like Swagger are almost criminally underutilised.

Depends on who you think the people are.

CTOs, technical team leads and such can make those decisions. And devs can also suggest migrating to simpler solutions.

If a tech giant like Amazon can do it like they did with Prime Video, I don’t think it’s impossible other companies can do so too.

You can have the best tool in the world and still find people just hitting their own face with it.

It doesn’t compile or transpile in actuality. It generates Java based on an abstract syntax tree. The concrete syntax is not considered in Java generation by MPS.

Because it was easier to use Java primitives than implement the constants myself.

MPS uses projectional editing. Which means for the user that everything you do is free from concrete syntax, and you basically edit a graphical representation of that abstract syntax tree directly, while it looks like you’re in a textual editor.

So I define abstract nodes that may have certain relationships with each other and then give them a representation in the editor (which is what you see in the screenshot). These nodes may also have generators assigned to them, which use map/reduce operations to generate whatever source code I desire. It usually includes its own bit of code, and triggers code generation of its children as well.

I hope that was somehow clear 😄

Great idea if I have to extend it

I like the way you think! 😂

Yes, it pretty much just wraps the expression in a “System.out.println(<expression>);”

Fortunately I generate Java source code from it. However MPS generates both source and byte code when you build the solution. For some reason I can’t get the byte code to run though, but the source code does, so I don’t care too much.

Very cool, I’d be interested in your publications once you’re done. I like metaprogramming, but once you realise you might have needed it, you’re already knee deep in fresh legacy code.

Valuable input! I actually am an undergrad student. There are a lot of frameworks out there that support writing languages, with MPS being one of them.

If I’d start from scratch again and had a little more time, I’d frankly try writing an interpreter myself, instead of trying to conform to weird framework syntax, which I won’t be able to reuse in any other context.

Saying syntax design is fiddly is an understatement. I focused very hard on getting an abstract syntax somehow finished before working on generation in my first iteration. Then I had so much technical debt, that I couldn’t get anything to work and had to rewrite a lot. So I scrapped it all and started again, starting with top level concepts including generation and only implementing some lower level ones, once everything around it worked properly.

You’re correct, but it doesn’t really matter for demo purposes. In an actual use case (whatever that would be for this language) you would of course want to use some kind of variable or expression there instead of a constant.

It’s a tool for designing domain specific languages. Really interesting!

Correct!

Vibe check is pretty much the scope. Classes aren’t a thing (yet).

Well done, here’s your price: 🏅

You may redeem it for a star on a GitHub repo of your choice.

It all gets put into the main method though in this version 😄

Recently switched jobs from maintaining a 15 year old Windows Forms .NET Framework legacy codebase.

At the new job we stick to Clean Architecture, use unit and integration tests, have a code generation tool, actually make nice use of generics and use dependency injection. Also agile processes, automatic build tools, whatever. The difference is night and day and I’m so glad my ex boss fired me because I told him he’s an asshole and his codebase is shit.