> (1) DSLs work great sometimes.
I'll take a stab at fleshing this out: DSLs work great when they have an IDE with autocomplete and a quick (or instant) feedback loop.
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I was gonna say something like "DSLs work great when they're small, purposeful and easy to test", I guess yours kind of helps when they're not what I'd suggest :)
This whole thread said exactly what I wanted to write. Feels bad to be so pre-empted.
DSLs that solve a specific problem with a page or two of documentation overhead are great.
Trying to reinvent paradigms or scope creep is where the pain comes in. Seems like the post author has been burned by that type of DSLs.
> DSLs that solve a specific problem with a page or two of documentation overhead are great.
Do you have any example? I’ve heard lots of good things of dsl, but never had the luck to witness it’s full glory.
(except for regex, which I love, but it has more than two pages of docs)
I've coded some myself, and have used some... but it depends on where you draw the line.
I'd consider Python's f-string syntax a DSL of sorts.
YAML might be considered a simple DSL, if you don't consider it a language/format instead. It's a bit more than 2-3 pages, but it's not hundreds of pages. And a simplified version could be constructed with <10 pages.
Similar to YAML, but for Markdown. I'd call that a DSL too, and it's even simpler than YAML.
Then, something more tiered as: CSV, JSON, TOML, INI, AsciiDoc
Once you're in the short form, it's a bit blurry what's a format, what's a DSL, and what is a language.
PS. Sorry for the late answer, I missed the direct question for a bit.
I would say that is the line between DSL and just “L” another language…
Maybe his problem is with those yucky distributed systems as in Kube, Antilles, etc. I write plain ordinary Java programs that work with a cloud API and compile bash scripts that colonize machines.
I think of Kube as more of abstractions whereas Wasp & Dark lang would be DSLs for the same concepts
Counterexample: regex. In terms of how successful DSLs are, I think, something like Perl's regular expression is, at least, in the top ten. Most regex users don't care about there being an IDE for it, I don't think there's a lot of value for regex autocomplete, even if such thing existed.
Regex is a good counterexample. It's the only useful DSL I can think of. That said, IDE support for regex would be cool, especially considering many languages have special syntax for regex.
> and a quick (or instant) feedback loop.
And yet Terraform/Tofu continues to poison people's brains. It boggles(!) the mind
So any DSL as an embedded language inside another.