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DSLs are a waste of time

leebriggs.co.uk

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Re: DSLs are a waste of time

#111

Post by klyrs »

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,…

> DSLs are, universally, awful, as they grow and grow until they encompass all features of a general programming language

This is the Slippery Slope Fallacy writ plain.

A great many DSLs are stable over years or decades. By your reasoning, a stable DSL is bad because it's going to grow. Why is it going to grow? crickets

Peeling away the fallacy, we could perhaps agree that "the uncontrolled growth of a DSL is an evil best avoided." Or if I'm being less generous, we could look at the bottom of that slippery slope and conclude "general programming languages are bad," because that's what the author seems most incensed by.

Re: DSLs are a waste of time

#112

Post by eduction »

dunk010 wrote: post #100
fyrn_ wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The random "ever done a CS degree?" is weird, and the premise that regular expressions are fundamental and mathematically general and therefore not a DSL is flawed: ebnf is also like that, and even more general. It _can_ parse HTML. Doesn't stop it from being an arbitrary representation of abstract syntax patterns. It's a DSL through and though and so is Regex. Actually pretty hard to find that pure of a DSL, which s…

Well, I remember them teaching that stuff, and regex is quite clearly a very different sort of DSL than the ones being discussed. That combined with the comment author's seeming lack of nuance made me wonder if they'd ever looked deeper than "all things without a for loop are a DSL". I think we are getting too far into the semantics here though, at risk of splitting hairs and geting lost in the details. The core poin…

I was replying to a very unuanced article, with the headline “DSLs are a waste of time” and no further hedging on that headline in the text. So ya, I knocked down the argument on the argument’s own (very broad) terms.

No need for the personal swipe.

> The core point is that the article is talking about some quite specific types of DSLs

It used specific types of DSLs as evidence but I don’t see a narrowing of the claim itself? Where are you getting that?

Re: DSLs are a waste of time

#114

Post by dunk010 »

kbenson wrote: post #102
dunk010 wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Regular expressions ... this representation is a somewhat fundamental and mathematically general representation of interacting with strings - the DLSs in question here are, quite obviously, nothing of the sort.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regular_language

Regular expressions have a deep mathematical background. An ad-hoc DSL from a company that specifies infrustructure does not.

Re: DSLs are a waste of time

#115

Post by fishnchips »

Marcin here, one of OpenTF folks.

I think the redeeming factor of Terraform is not the language itself, though I really like the fact that it's not a programming language. But I think the redeeming factor is the tool that interprets this language, and the fact that this tool can be taught new tricks - one of which is the CDKTF (not a fan, I think we can do better than that).

Here's an analogy. Most folks I know are at least skeptical about Java. The same folks would then praise Kotlin, Scala or Clojure as "good" JVM languages. The relative success of these languages owes much to the Java ecosystem and the JVM interop.

That's the reason I find Terraform worth saving. It's the JVM and the Java ecosystem of our cloud world. We can still build great things on it, whether you like HCL or not.

Re: DSLs are a waste of time

#116

Post by kbenson »

dunk010 wrote: post #114
kbenson wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Regular expressions ... this representation is a somewhat fundamental and mathematically general representation of interacting with strings - the DLSs in question here are, quite obviously, nothing of the sort. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regular_language Regular expressions have a deep mathematical background. An ad-hoc DSL from a company that specifies infrustructure does not .

Regular expressions, as used in practice in programming are mathematically general for interacting with strings, but they are in no way fundamental. They are a DSL for generating NFAs and DFAs (depending on the underlying engine). There is nothing fundamental about them, they are just a shorthand (a DSL) for those abstractions. Indeed, the very article you posted notes that anything able to be implemented as a finite automaton is also a regular language due to Kleene's theorem.

> Regular expressions have a deep mathematical background. An ad-hoc DSL from a company that specifies infrustructure does not.

You very specifically went far beyond making any statement about ad-hoc DSLs from companies that make infrastructure. You said "DSLs are, universally, awful".

I'm also interested why you left out makefiles in your original rebuttal. I think makefiles are a good example a simple and useful DSL for accomplishing what it sets out to do. That's not to say it can't turn into a mess (what language, domain specific or not, is free from that concern?), not that it solves all needs to all people, but makefiles are simple, straightforward, solve a useful problem, are well known by many people (and easy to explain and teach), and I don't think most people would consider them a mathematical concept core to computer science. Are they awful? If so, why?

Re: DSLs are a waste of time

#117

Post by fatfingerd »

dunk010 wrote: post #114
kbenson wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Regular expressions ... this representation is a somewhat fundamental and mathematically general representation of interacting with strings - the DLSs in question here are, quite obviously, nothing of the sort. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regular_language Regular expressions have a deep mathematical background. An ad-hoc DSL from a company that specifies infrustructure does not .

The real issue here is a DSL without intention of enforcing limitations permanently.

A Regex, SQL, TLA, CSS and so on are all better DSLs than allowing a general purpose language because they are meant to restrict inputs of lower priority than other goals, where priorities are largely fixed.

A corporate DSL is meant to expand to whatever grandiose plans the company has for accepting impractical input from platinum customers.

Re: DSLs are a waste of time

#118

Post by eternityforest »

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,…

Seems like the bad DSLs happen when one attempts to express a subset of general purpose imperative computation in an application specific way.

Re: DSLs are a waste of time

#119

Post by eternityforest »

klyrs wrote: post #111
dunk010 wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,…

> DSLs are, universally, awful, as they grow and grow until they encompass all features of a general programming language This is the Slippery Slope Fallacy writ plain. A great many DSLs are stable over years or decades. By your reasoning, a stable DSL is bad because it's going to grow. Why is it going to grow? crickets Peeling away the fallacy, we could perhaps agree that "the uncontrolled growth of a DSL is an evil…

General programming languages were meant from the start to be something like what they are today. They're intended to manage complexity, not pretend nobody will ever want to do complex things.

They are also not application specific. Language design is hard. DSLs are made up by people who's main project isn't the language.

Sometimes the motive for a DSL is something like "I don't like how this takes 5 lines of code in JS, if I made my own language it would only take 3"

Re: DSLs are a waste of time

#120

Post by eternityforest »

owlstuffing wrote: post #67
schmichael wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

JavaScript was a cute little DSL once too! I feel like the author missed a more obvious comparison between Puppetlang and HCL: vendor specific languages. When you consider them from that perspective it’s clear that the decision is based more on which company you trust to serve your long term needs over any point in time implementation details. Is that company Puppet? HashiCorp? Pulumi? The implementation details obvi…

Yikes! JavaScript is probably not the best example of a “good” DSL. It’s a crap language that benefited largely from being the only game in town re browser access.

I consider JS a pretty great language these days, my only complaint is the lack of a batteries included standard library that does the stuff underscore et al do.
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