[crdrost]

This is an interesting take. One does need to draw a distinction between “what everybody writes” (copilot generates) and “what has to be written” (this code is the ‘useless’ stuff bemoaned by the parent comment). Obviously everybody writes what has to be written, but you're right that there is a distinction.

One gets a vision of the copilot autocomplete, as kind of missing what would be an essential highlight, in the templates it provides. “These parts highlighted in red, do not change those, for some reason everybody does it that way. But these parts highlighted in yellow, I've seen a bunch of different takes on those; this is where some variation occurs and where you might want to customize it yourself.”

On this take, copilot is a poor way of providing syntactic templates—macros—and indeed those macros take the form of template substitution, which means they form in theory a lambda calculus for that metalanguage.

That is itself interesting because I only know of one programming language which says “we are going to live out here in la-la-functional-programming-math-land, but we are going to describe values which are actual fragments of computer programs,” and that language is Haskell—though never used to write at this scale!. Interesting to think that the Ur-goal of Copilot is to provide what you were missing because you didn't wrap your language in Haskell in the first place!

With that said, a better way to start with metalanguage design if this problem irks you is probably not Haskell itself (it doesn't have an easy way to swap out its compile target language from C-- to some other target, I don't think) but something like Ometa2: http://wiki.squeak.org/squeak/3930