Reviewed a paper about an architecture analysis tool. One of those that checks code patterns and naming conventions etc. With my code gen mindset, this kind of tool seems so useless and backward to me … why do people write boilerplate by hand and then check it? I don’t get it.

It’s the difference between using a centralized approach to ensure everything conforms to the same rule set vs. a decentralized approach where this is merely one of many quality criteria and things can evolve more easily. A bit like static vs dynamic typing ;)

No, the paper explicitly suggests a top-down process, talks about „enforcing“ and failing the build and stuff.