[antlr-interest] acceptance of new ideas (was philosophy about translation)

[Andy Voelkel]

> I totally agree with you on that point. Having a tool available is so

> much better in any craft. It's hard to understand why some people  
> cannot see the value of that. I mean having a compiler still doesn't  
> write programs for you, but it saves you from all the nitty gritty  
> details you don't want to bother with. Funnily enough, in other areas

> they do accept that: see garbage collection for one thing. Nowadays  
> everyone jumps onto that train. It ain't perfect in many cases, but  
> it will help you to get your work done sooner. Same applies to your  
> project. And incidentally the same applies to IDE's, too. At least  
> that's slowly changing. I don't want to go back to vi to edit my  
> projects. Too. Much. Hassle.

Remember how long it took to accept garbage collection, and IDEs, and
rapid prototyping. After using those concepts on LISP machines in the
early eighties, I was convinced that the mainstream programming world
would be on top of these ideas within a couple of years. Not so! And it
wasn't fundamentally because of lack of MIPs or memory, it was because
of calcified mindsets. 

Another idea that I encountered back then was the idea of code writing
code, which was facilitated by the LISP language. It was primitive,
particularly in regards to debugging the process and also in the
readability of the code. But that is one of the things that attracted me
to a program like ANTLR, even though I really haven't been able to use
it much yet. It is an intelligently designed piece of code designed to
write code. I sincerely feel that much of the future of programming lies
in this domain.

I was recently inspired by a talk at a LISP conference where the author
used LISP as a tool to auto-generate reams of C# code. This isn't a new
idea in itself, but what was remarkable was the readability of the C#
code. It was completely acceptable as a code deliverable. It didn't look
like auto-generated gobblity-gook. It changed my whole view of this kind
of approach. 

If one can take this idea one step further into the world of automated
code maintenance or modification, while not adversely affecting
readability, one will really be onto something, IMO.

It seems to me that Andy's approach is to be admired, simply because it
takes a different and innovative approach to a problem. That doesn't
mean that all language translation should take this approach. For some
applications, correctness is more important that readability. But most
of the time, his approach would yield what I would want.

- Andy