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DSLs are a waste of time

leebriggs.co.uk

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Re: DSLs are a waste of time

#121

Post by eternityforest »

diego_moita wrote: post #65
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.”

> We stop calling the useful ones “DSLs” so this is a truism. Bingo! Lua was born as a DSL for configuration files. Today is way more than that. JSON was born as a DSL for describing data, a less verbose alternative to XML. It is more than that.

JSON never got new features. We just made new things around it.

Which is why it's amazing for data interchange and obnoxious to directly interact with by hand.

Re: DSLs are a waste of time

#122

Post by SPBS »

em-bee wrote: post #108
SPBS wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I guess I should qualify it by saying "Domain Specific Language" instead of "language". Newer programming languages are different because they have a huge body of extremely clever people working on it making sure it's up to standard. DSLs do not reach the same amount of rigor, they're just there. Some parsers loosely thrown together. Where's the documentation? The specification? The language servers, the editor support? None. Don't invent your own DSL (other than for yourself).

Re: DSLs are a waste of time

#123

Post by eternityforest »

baq wrote: post #68
jen20 wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

CDK for Prolog would be quite the trip. As it turns out, what matters is whether the model is declarative. As some uses of YAML go to show, declarative vs not is an orthogonal axis to how general purpose or otherwise a language is, and orthogonal again to whether it looks like a configuration file or code.

I hate yaml with a passion. It marginally better than xml for reading (wins huge on comment syntax) and worse for everything else. It makes zero sense we somehow ended up with it as standard configuration serialization format. Note yaml is not a DSL. It's a tree serialization format! Everything interesting is happening after it is parsed. Extreme examples point to e.g. github actions conditions. Anyway, back on topic…

Better than making your own syntax for a declarative system, that now needs custom tools.

I'd prefer it to lisp, and to JSON if I have to hand read or write it.

What's the alternative, besides specifying your declarative stuff inside something like Python?

Re: DSLs are a waste of time

#124

Post by eternityforest »

systemvoltage wrote: post #92
jesseryoung wrote: post #89

Programming languages will always be better, more feature rich and more capable than any DSL. However, the whole reason things like terraform or puppet become popular is because the people who write the DSL don't consider themselves "programmers" and they don't want to be thought of as "programmers". As somebody who identifies as a "programmer" and often has to manage infrastructure I would absolutely love for a seri…

Very much agree, I do wonder how can things like crontab be specified? The cron job syntax is its own fricking thing that I have to always look up. But then, I wonder, how else can it be specified? yaml file?

I've spent way too many hours this week looking for a better model for configurable timers than cron.

Cron is kind of awful, not just the syntax but the logic. You can't say "Every three days but not on Monday, if it would land on a Monday, defer that run till the next selected day".

There is also too many ways to say the same thing, so GUI editors are hard.

Re: DSLs are a waste of time

#125

Post by eternityforest »

dunk010 wrote: post #105

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…

I'd rather they just fix whatever problem or missing feature caused me to want logic in the config file.

Ideally, why do I even need a nontrivial config file at all? I want more stuff that just works, and has standard interfaces to find and connect to all it's other pieces.

Even manually executing SQL to make a database is too much.

I don't want make files at all. They're only there because C/C++ doesn't handle it for you. Python doesn't need them. Node.js doesn't need them. They have build config stuff, but it's nowhere near as in depth as makefiles.

Apache is insane with all the different configurations, and how it's separate from PHP and MySQL and it all has to be configured to work together.

Lots of tools just work. They have few options, and all the important configuration options are set at runtime automatically based on input data, auto discovery, and things like that. Install and run. That's it.

If I need a full programming language to configure, then whatever I'm doing probably isn't configuration, it's more like plugin writing.

Re: DSLs are a waste of time

#126

Post by jaredklewis »

randomdata wrote: post #84
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.”

> Is SQL a “waste of time?” It certainly wastes a lot of my time because it is considered just a DSL and not a "real" programming language, and therefore doesn't get the same kind of attention towards making it better that "real" programming languages get. Maybe there is something to the original thesis. Like, why can't I import shared query modules to compose into my queries? I can't imagine any other programming la…

I feel like the things you don't like about SQL are explicit design choices that make it well suited for many tasks, but perhaps not whatever you are trying to do.

It's like, "Geez, regular expressions sure do suck. They don't come with a package manager, concurrency, or a way to make system calls." I only feel comfortable embedding regular expressions or SQL in code because they are inherently restricted "DSLs."

If SQL was a general purpose programming language, then we wouldn't need SQL, we would just use existing general purpose programming languages.

Assuming you have some use case for query composition, why is the feature better handled within SQL as opposed to in the general purpose query language managing the DB queries and making the calls?

Re: DSLs are a waste of time

#127

Post by baq »

eternityforest wrote: post #123
baq wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hate yaml with a passion. It marginally better than xml for reading (wins huge on comment syntax) and worse for everything else. It makes zero sense we somehow ended up with it as standard configuration serialization format. Note yaml is not a DSL. It's a tree serialization format! Everything interesting is happening after it is parsed. Extreme examples point to e.g. github actions conditions. Anyway, back on topic…

Better than making your own syntax for a declarative system, that now needs custom tools. I'd prefer it to lisp, and to JSON if I have to hand read or write it. What's the alternative, besides specifying your declarative stuff inside something like Python?

I agree. For some things yaml is good enough. XML, JSON and s-exprs are also good enough. Everything is good enough until it isn’t. At that point your configuration becomes code becomes configuration becomes code you know the drill.

My point is that the more complex use cases like GitHub actions conditions invent their own DSLs in yaml string values anyway because nobody wants to write in a half broken lisp but in yaml instead of s-exprs, so suddenly you’re writing yaml but with JavaScript. Might as well start out with JavaScript and not pretend it’s a simple declarative language when it clearly isn’t. CDK people clearly saw that, not sure if execution is optimal, but at least the general purpose tooling works (libraries, types, tests, IDEs, etc).

Re: DSLs are a waste of time

#128

Post by em-bee »

SPBS wrote: post #122
em-bee wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I guess I should qualify it by saying "Domain Specific Language" instead of "language". Newer programming languages are different because they have a huge body of extremely clever people working on it making sure it's up to standard. DSLs do not reach the same amount of rigor, they're just there. Some parsers loosely thrown together. Where's the documentation? The specification? The language servers, the editor suppo…

i am just picking your examples apart :-)

i think we both want the same outcome, that is well designed and useful languages, whether they are DSLs or not, and i agree that most DLSs probably aren't that. but not all general languages are getting that kind of rigor from the start either. some get it rather late after they became popular enough to have demand for fixing the problems that stem from their initial ad-hoc design. i am looking at javascript and php here in particular, but there are probably others.

DSLs, due to their nature are less likely to ever reach the level of popularity where its worth it to fix design problems. general languages on the other hand are more likely designed by people who care and without the pressure of a quick solution. (and its my understanding that javascript was a quick solution, which would kind of prove the point)

esperanto, btw, was designed with rigor.

Re: DSLs are a waste of time

#129

Post by em-bee »

pydry wrote: post #59
chubot wrote: post #51

FWIW this wiki page I started may help frame discussions like this: Survey of Config Languages - https://github.com/oilshell/oil/wiki/Survey-of-Config-Langua... It puts a bunch of languages in 5 cateogires. Terraform is at least not a YAML DSL, a very common pattern which I don't understand the appeal of. I guess the main appeal is that you can copy and paste, and pretend it's data in simple cases. But even Terraform…

>Terraform is at least not a YAML DSL, a very common pattern which I don't understand the appeal of. I guess the main appeal is that you can copy and paste, and pretend it's data in simple cases. It's easy to write an interpreter for - everything maps to either a scalar, list or a hashmap in any language. It also looks pretty familiar to most people. It gets abused an awful lot but so does every language that gets po…

It's easy to write an interpreter for

it's even easier to write an interpreter/parser for s-expressions.

i think the designers of YAML had the hope that it would not get abused as a DSL, which makes the abuse even worse.

and while i'd love to see an indent based syntax for data, YAML isn't it.

Re: DSLs are a waste of time

#130

Post by em-bee »

saltcured wrote: post #90
pydry wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Terraform is at least not a YAML DSL, a very common pattern which I don't understand the appeal of. I guess the main appeal is that you can copy and paste, and pretend it's data in simple cases. It's easy to write an interpreter for - everything maps to either a scalar, list or a hashmap in any language. It also looks pretty familiar to most people. It gets abused an awful lot but so does every language that gets po…

I thing you're getting to the heart of the matter here. I'm not sure if I'm being redundant, because I reloaded a few times and see that _many_ posts have been made in the short time since I started looking at this article and reading comments. But, the discussing seems to be bifurcating into different camps. Do you assume that the blog and discussion are narrowly scoped to sysop/devops problems, or a general diatrib…

fully agree, especially with the second paragraph. even as a developer, i want a simple DSL that lets me declare things and not twist the data structures into code. and especially as a programmer, if code is needed for more complex structures, i want that to be done in a real programming language.

so i am favoring the two products approach, or maybe a language with a well designed syntax for data, where the relationship between the two is like that of JSON and javascript.

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