Lot's of stuff on
DSLs today (though most of it is old news). First, we have
chromatic a little peeved that DSL doesn't seem to mean much, asking isn't it just an API? Probably so (but does that mean it can't be viewed as a DSL?).
But then
David A. Black (not really in the order I'm presenting them here) asks if really what people mean by "a DSL" is really just "DSL," or do they mean they are using domain specific language, not
a domain specific language?
Werner Schuster at InfoQ
brought all this to my attention, and quoted Blaine Buxton, who said "
a DSL is a healthy bi-product of a good object-oriented design."
We've also got Peter Bell
reintroducing us to Martin Fowler's talk on InfoQ as
a good 25-minute introduction to DSLs, and Fowler's
short description of the subject.
Then we have this absolutely marvelous post from Peter about
why in the world DSLs should matter to you (
if you read only one of the links I've pointed to here, make this the one).
The posts from Martin (and video), Peter, and Blaine pretty much describe my view, and the response to chromatic I was planning on writing. But I don't think it's valuable by itself to describe precisely what a DSL is (in fact, Fowler mentioned there is no such line that can be drawn). And, since they've said it better than I likely could have, I've just pointed to them so as to avoid having a post dedicated solely to that purpose, which would have been a colossal waste of time.
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Nice pull together - very cool.
Posted by
Peter Bell
on Jun 18, 2007 at 03:22 PM UTC - 6 hrs
