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DSLs are a waste of time

leebriggs.co.uk

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Re: DSLs are a waste of time

#101

Post by aranchelk »

Ultimately learning a DSL is learning a syntax, a vocabulary, a model of execution, and the underlying domain.

The syntax shouldn’t take you terribly long unless it was badly made.

In my experience virtually any project whether you use a standalone DSL, an embedded DSL, framework, library, or writing something yourself, you will have to understand the underlying domain to be useful.

The model of execution can be simple or possibly tricky. There may be a small benefit to having an embedded DSL or framework over a standalone DSL as information learned could be transferable, but model of execution could still be more complicated and different than the underlying language in the other case. I’m thinking of things like Chef, Angular, and Parsec.

That leaves the vocabulary which you’ll either need to learn or develop.

You’ll take all of the domain knowledge, which as already stated, is the important bit. If you work in the same domain, even if it’s with a very different language, model, etc., you’ll have a great insight into what’s going on.

I feel like the opinions expressed in the article really just show a lack of experience of what happens after you’re done working with a piece of tech.

Re: DSLs are a waste of time

#102

Post by kbenson »

dunk010 wrote: post #95
kbenson wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the problem here is more that people still need to work on their positions to figure out what they really mean, because while you have some points, regular expressions are the canonical example of a DSL. Their domain is strings, and they make certain things you want to do in them very easy to express. The problem here is that while you can say “Terraform is more than a DSL” - if you ever back the layers or tr…

If you re-read my reply, you'll see that I said that regex is a DSL, but doesn't apply for different reasons.

I did read your reply, and I think your reasons for excluding it are insufficient. You can't just exclude any DSL that succeeds (has become "universal") and say "see? no DSLs are good!" The point of me noting how people resisted (and still resist) regular expression usage is to note that just like any other DSL there are those that dislike it and eschew its use and instead just write the code. It is exactly what the article is talking about, where it advocates writing in the base language and not using a DSL.

If you're going to make a serious argument that "DSLs are, universally, awful" then you're going to need to account for regular expressions a bit more carefully. That can be you admitting that you just dislike them and don't use them so consider them awful as well, but if you don't hate them then you may want to focus on the why, and it is likely a much more interesting conversation topic to pursue than "DSLs bad".

Re: DSLs are a waste of time

#103

Post by dunk010 »

schmichael wrote: post #80
dunk010 wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

JavaScript wasn't really a DSL though was it? Not in the sense of this article. Brendan Eich was hired to embed Scheme into Netscape Navigator. That's not the same as the kind of crippled templating languages this article is discussing.

One is procedural (JavaScript), the other is declarative (HCL). Both are (or at least were originally ) “crippled” compared to “real” languages. Both grew immensely each eventually escaping their single-vendor origins.

I don't think that this is a true comparison. JavaScript was limited mostly by its sandboxing, not what you could write in it. You can't really compare that to what HCL is and does.

Re: DSLs are a waste of time

#104

Post by tremon »

denton-scratch wrote: post #37

> I was left with an expertise and knowledge of a language that was now, effectively useless. VB did that to me; the lesson I learned is to avoid[0] languages with just a single implementation. As a consequence, I'm not very interested in languages like Ruby, Go and Rust. In the old days, every language had a train of compilers/interpreters following it. Pascal, COBOL, FORTRAN, even ALGOL. I believe that in those day…

Ruby has multiple implementations: https://github.com/planetruby/awesome-rubies

The main implementations are:

  - MRI (aka CRuby, the reference implementation)
  - mruby (lightweight embedded engine)
  - JRuby (on top of the JVM)
  - IronRuby (on top of the .Net stack)

Re: DSLs are a waste of time

#105

Post by dunk010 »

Steve Yegge made this same point ~20 years ago:

> The whole nasty "configuration" problem becomes incredibly more convenient in the Lisp world. No more stanza files, apache-config, .properties files, XML configuration files, Makefiles — all those lame, crappy, half-language creatures that you wish were executable, or at least loaded directly into your program without specialized processing. I know, I know — everyone raves about the power of separating your code and your data. That's because they're using languages that simply can't do a good job of representing data as code. But it's what you really want, or all the creepy half-languages wouldn't all evolve towards being Turing-complete, would they?

Via: https://sites.google.com/site/steveyegge2/the-emacs-problem

Re: DSLs are a waste of time

#106

Post by kbenson »

morby wrote: post #93
kbenson wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the problem here is more that people still need to work on their positions to figure out what they really mean, because while you have some points, regular expressions are the canonical example of a DSL. Their domain is strings, and they make certain things you want to do in them very easy to express. The problem here is that while you can say “Terraform is more than a DSL” - if you ever back the layers or tr…

Aren’t regular expressions the abstraction to state machines? They all get converted to a DFA or NFA, no?

Yes, and I said as much. All DSLs are abstractions to some sort of code that does some action. What I'm saying is that we have examples of bad DSLs, and good DSLs, and perhaps by focusing between them we can come up with some useful information about what distinguishes one from the other.

To me, that's a much more interesting (and useful!) discussion than just piling onto the DSLs are awful bandwagon, and I also think it's a flaw in any argument put forth in that argument that needs to be addresses before I can accept it.

Re: DSLs are a waste of time

#107

Post by devonkim »

dybber wrote: post #57
eduction wrote: post #20

We stop calling the useful ones “DSLs” so this is a truism. Is SQL a “waste of time?” Regular expressions, HTML, Makefiles, CSS (and CSS selectors aka jquery selectors)? It’s the bad ones that are a waste of time. The ones still called “dsl” instead of just “language, “format,” or “syntax.”

My take is that all embedded DSLs are bad. By embedding your DSL in another language you might gain certain things for free, but you also sacrifice a lot of control and often extra boilerplate code is necessary. The exception of course is Lisp where embedded languages can feel like standalone languages.

From what I’ve heard of and used myself LINQ works pretty well as an embedded DSL because it’s more like a language extension with some solid semantics rather than a classic embedded DSL that is not terribly far from transpilers

Re: DSLs are a waste of time

#108

Post by em-bee »

SPBS wrote: post #39
eduction wrote: post #20

We stop calling the useful ones “DSLs” so this is a truism. Is SQL a “waste of time?” Regular expressions, HTML, Makefiles, CSS (and CSS selectors aka jquery selectors)? It’s the bad ones that are a waste of time. The ones still called “dsl” instead of just “language, “format,” or “syntax.”

It's like (speaking) languages really. The good ones are ones that have always been there and people have just sort of accepted into the mainstream (like English). Don't invent your own language. If you can do it in an existing language, don't invent your own. SQL and CSS selectors fit the bill. Everyone has just kind of accepted them now. It's not an excuse to try creating new languages for every new thing, it's an…

If you can do it in an existing language, don't invent your own

then we should all be using c, lisp, smalltalk and perl (add your favourite old language here). because most younger languages don't bring anything new to the table.

The good ones are ones that have always been there

esperanto? not exactly popular, but it is definitely better than english and solves problems that english can't. (it's just that people don't realize the problem yet)

Re: DSLs are a waste of time

#109

Post by ohgodplsno »

r0b1n wrote: post #82
ohgodplsno wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can add other languages, such as Kotlin to that list. It is explicitly made to give you the ability to build a strongly typed DSL with proper scoping, references, validation, comes with all the benefits of a real language, including working language servers right out of the box that autocomplete everything properly. But that would require sysadmins to admit that editing all their config through nano with no synta…

ssh-ing somewhere strange on a small laggy connection is standard operating procedure. Not having internet is normal. Not being able to write gigabytes of crap into root's home is normal. Not to mention not installing some weird language environment like Kotlin just so the config is highlighted properly. Including all the bazillion libs i'll need. And all the editor configuration that i'll of course have to copy arou…

>You can pry vim from my cold dead hands.

I won't need to, you're already giving yourself carpal tunnel with all the :wQ! INSERT-MODE :wmkGDonzn zz CWSFD, these hands are already marked for death.

Re: DSLs are a waste of time

#110

Post by eduction »

dunk010 wrote: post #71
eduction wrote: post #20

We stop calling the useful ones “DSLs” so this is a truism. Is SQL a “waste of time?” Regular expressions, HTML, Makefiles, CSS (and CSS selectors aka jquery selectors)? It’s the bad ones that are a waste of time. The ones still called “dsl” instead of just “language, “format,” or “syntax.”

I think your examples are spurious and wrong, when compared with the specific kind of DSL the article talks about. SQL is a "Fourth Generation Language", much like Prolog, which is quite different to what is being discussed. HTML isn't a DSL; it's a type of SGML, a specific document markup language - you can't just shout "DSL" and squint a bunch and assume "All sort-of-languages are DSLs". Regular expressions, sure,…

I don’t think it makes any sense to dismiss regex “because it’s so universal” — you’re disqualifying a DSL because it’s successful, then saying all DSLs are unsuccessful. It’s just a tautology at that point, same as the article.

(And SQL is not a dsl because it’s a … programming language? But also HTML is not a domain specific language precisely because it’s not a programming language? I don’t follow your logic at all. I don’t think either are programming languages, but both are languages in another sense of the word, as evidenced by their full names, and certainly dsls.)

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