Martin Fowler thinks DSL's are Hot
Monday, July 4, 2005
Martin Fowler has posted an article on Domain Specific Languages (DSLs) titled "Language Workbenches: The Killer-App for Domain Specific Languages?" on his web site. This has already been mentioned on c.l.l. and on LtU; however, I thought it worth mentioning again here. I've discussed DSL's and Metaprogramming in the past (see here, here, here, here) and I've stated that I think this is one of the big advantages of Lisp as a language. In his article, Martin Fowler acknowledges Lisp's strengths in this area:
"Lisp is probably the strongest example of expressing DSLs directly in the language itself.. Symbolic processing is embedded into the name as well as practice of lispers. Doing this is helped by the facilities of lisp - minimalist syntax, closures, and macros present a heady cocktail of DSL tooling. Paul Graham writes a lot about this style of development. Smalltalk also has a strong tradition of this style of development. "He provides an example of how to construct a simple DSL using a combination of custom parsing code and XML. Rainer Joswig (on c.l.l.) takes the same example and demonstrates how easy it is to code this in Lisp.
