December 30, 2008 oslo

Martin Fowler: DslExceptionalism

I love what Martin has to say on the topic of designing DSLs:

DSLs are seen as a small and simple subset of general purpose programming thinking. As a result people think that what’s true for general purpose languages is also true for DSLs (with the implication that DSLs are too small to be worth thinking much about).

I’m increasingly of the opposite conclusion. The rules for DSLs are different to the rules for general purpose languages - and this applies on multiple dimensions.”

When you’re ready, Oslo lets you build DSLs to be as simple or as complex as you like.