Approaches and tools

As this module’s code generation is inspired by the workings of David Beazley’s Cluegen I thought it was briefly worth discussing his note on learning an approach vs using a tool.

I think that learning an approach is valuable, this module would not exist without the example given by cluegen.

However, what I found was that in essentially every case where I wanted to use these generating tools, I needed to modify them - often significantly. It quickly became easier to just create my own tool and upload it as a package.

For example, cluegen has a few subtle “exercises for the reader”. It needs extending and fixing for some use-cases.

• Default values that are not builtins need to be passed as part of the globals dict to exec.

• No support for mutable defaults.

• Subclass methods will be overwritten if they call a cluegen method that has not been generated via super().methodname(...)

• inspect.signature(cls) does not work if cls.__init__ has not already been generated. (I think this is actually a bug in inspect).

• Need an extra filter to support things like ClassVar.

In the general spirit though, this module intends to provide some basic tools to help create your own customized boilerplate generators. The generator included in the base module is intended to be used to help ‘bootstrap’ a modified generator with features that work how you want them to work.

The prefab module is the more fully featured tool that handles the additional cases I needed.