Greetings to all the fellow redditors. I'm not sure if this post is on-topic, but it got frowned upon at programmers.stackexchange.com for being too discussion-provoking, and the first place they suggest for the discussions like this is /r/programming. But it only accepts links and not questions, so here i am.

Anyway. here's the deal. I'm working on a code generator project that would be able to facilitate creating code using the user-defined goals and pre-created technical patterns of achieving them. For this, i am required a tool to create those technical patterns and automate following them when processing the "user stories" into machine instructions.

Apparently, i am not alone in the woods on this topic, because some googling around brought me to the things like Specification and Description Language. From what i see, such things might be what i'm after. But there are very little details about the practical side of such tools on that page, and i'm not sure if i'm looking in the right direction.

I remember being interested in the similar topic several years ago, and a then job colleague sent me a Wiki link at a huge list of software products that were all dedicated to the same thing. But i can't seem to recall what keywords i used back then, so i'm unable to find anything of use now.

Which is why i need your help guys. If the task i described rings any bell at all, please help me figure out two things:

• Are such tools still favored by the CS community? Do people still believe in such kind of meta-programming, or it's widely accepted as a dead end?
• If such tools do exist and are maintained up until now, which ones are the most prominent and worth looking at?

Thanks!