There's enough programming languages, we don't need more, just implement one of them. You will benefit massively from the language's ecosystem.
Tell HN: Please stop making more DSLs
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Re: Tell HN: Please stop making more DSLs
#2Don't most DSLs sit atop an existing language, thus giving you easy access to the existing language's ecosystem as well as the syntactic or semantic advantages that led you to create the DSL in the first place?
It's not an either/or relationship, at least not in my experience.
Re: Tell HN: Please stop making more DSLs
#3I think of the awful battles over configuration languages and systems like YAML, TOML, and the Spring Framework. People eventually get the idea this is the road to ruin so they think “let’s write configuration as code” which is the highway to hell.
Re: Tell HN: Please stop making more DSLs
#4Maybe some examples would making this more convincing...
Re: Tell HN: Please stop making more DSLs
#5Please, at least once in your life, make a DSL for the sheer joy of creation:
Re: Tell HN: Please stop making more DSLs
#6Don't most DSLs sit atop an existing language, thus giving you easy access to the existing language's ecosystem as well as the syntactic or semantic advantages that led you to create the DSL in the first place? It's not an either/or relationship, at least not in my experience.
Yep. A dsl makes it so you don't have to write a new language
Re: Tell HN: Please stop making more DSLs
#7Don't most DSLs sit atop an existing language, thus giving you easy access to the existing language's ecosystem as well as the syntactic or semantic advantages that led you to create the DSL in the first place? It's not an either/or relationship, at least not in my experience.
Yep. A dsl makes it so you don't have to write a new language
That is an embedded DSL, hence eDSL. A DSL doesn't have to be embedded.
Re: Tell HN: Please stop making more DSLs
#8At some point we lost the original concept of DSLs. The “domain” here was supposed to be fairly far removed from the realms of software engineering. For example, if you work for a bank, a DSL couched in the needs of financial modeling for the problems of the bank. If you work in automotive, a DSL that is hand crafted for the purpose of running on the car you are building. In particular the idea was very much these would be used by non-programmers. Programmers would work with domain experts to organically evolve one or more, intermixable domain languages, in the interest of more precisely capturing their knowledge than written specs, and allow them to iterate on the software independently from engineers. The domain languages often were intentionally imprecise and ambiguous, with programmers tasked with providing generators and interpreters into a running system. I think the concept still has merit - that we still live in a world where domain experts are largely siloed from being able to actually adjust the behavior of the software systems they’re stakeholders in is sign enough there is still work to be done, even if DSLs aren’t the solution.
The concept kind of came and went, the two projects that really went all in on the idea were JetBrains MPS (still alive) and Intentional Software (now dead.)
Edit: MPS has some case studies on their site that nicely demonstrate the concept here - as you can tell, it’s very different than the way we typically use DSLs :)
Edit2: they have a pretty good video that explains the core concept above here: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=eEUMAx3g6do
Re: Tell HN: Please stop making more DSLs
#9And to think that all the energy that went into creating so many new DSLs could have been directed to making even more linux distributions. Such shame.
Re: Tell HN: Please stop making more DSLs
#10Please, at least once in your life, make a DSL for the sheer joy of creation: https://craftinginterpreters.com/
Or just write a lisp interpreter and get both worlds.