3 ms·
What happens if the model tool company goes out of business? What happens if the model tool company gets acquired and the new owner decides to raise the prices
by thesuperbigfrog 5y ago
What happens if the model tool company goes out of business?
What happens if the model tool company gets acquired and the new owner decides to raise the prices too much and some of their customers cannot afford to pay?
What happens to all of the generated source code produced by these tools when the business using the generated source code needs changes made, but no longer has the models or tools?
Yes, you need both specs and tools. Vendor lock-in can really bite, especially if your business depends on tools that are no longer available.
- dragonwriter 5y agoSo, the problem isn't “generated code”, but “obscure, proprietary toolchain stacks”. Which is also a problem for compiles code in not-widely-supported forms (language/target combo).
- thesuperbigfrog 5y ago“obscure, proprietary toolchain stacks” are half of the problem. Understanding, updating, and maintaining algorithmically-generated source code is the other half of the problem. If a human is writing the code, hopefully variables have sensible names, there is logical organization of the code, and there are some comments to explain. (Of course, some humans write code that is worse than algorithmically-generated code. // shudder)
- dragonwriter 5y ago> Understanding, updating, and maintaining algorithmically-generated source code is the other half of the problem. There is no such thing: algorithmically generated code that isn’t in final executable form is not source code, its an intermediate representation. The fact that its in a language that some source is written in doesn't change that. If you are maintaining anything other than the source form, you are doing it wrong (and if the tool is half-baked so you have to manually massage the generated code, that's definitely a problem with the tool.)