Jeffrey Snover, Martin Fowler and Neil Ford: Domain Specific Languages

The Discussion

• 

  LINQ is then a "super" DSL and interesting in this space. It is general, but at the same time can be used cleanly over specific domains such as objects, xml, data, or concurrency or others. Yet, you don't have to learn a whole new DSL for each.  You just use specific extention points for the domain at hand. At the same time, it is general enouph to wrap itself nicely over other domains without injecting yet another language.  I like the idea of being able to plug-in other dsls or scripts inside my language to abstract some subset of a framework to make it easier to write and read.  Say the new framework is Mesh for example.  Maybe a dsl could be surfaced that would make it easier to use the broad api inside my language (c#).  Maybe it is linq, maybe something else.  I do know at times it would be great to be able to embed some Powershell into my c# code (or visa-versa) in an easy way.

• 

  Is there anything like the Dynamic Runtime, but for DSL? That would let us slap together our own DSLs quickly w/out worrying about the plumbing.