Of course the idea behind "generated code" is that you don't look at it. Looking at generated code is like disassembling an .o file - unless you need to debug your compiler (or code generator), there's no reason to treat it as anything other than an opaque blob.

That's a real problem with generated code, though. It almost always ends up that there's some issue with either your original code or the code that generates the generated code, and you end up having to dive into the ugly generated code to figure out what the problem is. I'm pretty sure this is the major reason code generation isn't used more often.

Well, I guess you need a meta debugger here.

> I daydream of a programming language to which I can fuzzily explain my needs and it automagically solves problem

That's the core of our startup :) We're building robots who can build games. You just give us basic simple instructions like "this type of gameplay, with these features and these characters" that can be described in 5 lines of code. And we build a whole game with it. To the user, it looks automagic. But inside, it's just a compiler that converts one data format into another.

> Natural language processing might be hard to debug as part of a programming language though.

You don't really need to go there. Just limit your input to what your compiler knows. Instead of trying to guess intent from ambiguous input, you just give them options instead. If you really want the user to have the freedom to type their ideas out, then use auto-complete and/or code suggestions. That "feels" like natural typing, but dodges the problem with NLP that is trying to guess what ambiguous input means.

Agreed, I've been in this situation twice and both times it was completely terrible.

The worst codebase I ever worked on was some C++ generated using a scripting language. It made awkward and unweildy looking C++ code that leaked smart pointers everywhere and barely worked. But man, the authors that wrote it thought they were so clever.

Apple's Objective-C to MSVC C++ clang compiler is a close second. I'm not sure if it ever made it out into the wild or if it was just an Apple internal thing, but there's nothing like debugging a 3000 character post-preprocessor C++ expansion of several nested obc_msgsend calls.

It's rough when you long for the C preprocessor. At least the CPP limitations prevent people from stretching themselves too far into meta territory. It's almost kind of elegant in its badness, now that I've seen what people can do to imperative/OO languages when more capable macro processors are involved.

When I do it, I write my own generator in C#. The resulting code looks however I want it to look.

On one occasion, this worked out better than expected, when I realized I could convert my compiler to an interpreter and get a really flexible program configurable at runtime.