I’m always thinking about better ways to create software. Create. Sculpt.
Code generation? Maybe. But I’ve left kindergarten. Creating thousands of identical sand pies doesn’t make them more tasty. Or useful.
A few days ago, I had a long talk with a guy at an Xtext presentation. Xtext can create EMF models out of computer languages. Why is that useful? Because you can get at the guts of a language.
Look here:
... some complex setup
for( Item item : list ) {
... do something smart with item...
}
But the guy (who wrote this code — that’s me, thank you) made a mistake: For some reasons, items with a value < 5000 should be ignored. No problem, we can simply add that. If we have the source. But imagine you had a tool to “patch” the code. Like so:
...
for( ... ) {
if( 5000 > item.value() )
continue;
...
}
...
The “…” are actual code. They mean “anything”. So this reads: “Skip code until you find a for loop and add a new condition at the front of the loop. Leave everything else intact.”
Pretty hard to do today. If we had a tool that could create an EMF model for the Java code. Enter MoDisco.
MoDisco can create a model for a software. What all those CASE tools did but the other way around. It creates a model for the software as it is now. Not very useful at first glance but think about the example above.
Or think that you’ve identifier a dangerous pattern in your code base. Now you want to fix it. MoDisco can search for these patterns for you.
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