Today, I spent quite a while helping a friend to architect at high-level a DSL (Domain Specific Language).
Even though at the time he did not realize what he wanted to do was create a DSL. TO him all he needed was a way to do excel like formula expressions inside his code, but in a more English like syntax well as English as a chemical scientist can be I guess.
To this end, I thought it might be worthwhile explaining what a DSR is, since I will build a few of them for the project’s I mentioned that I am playing with for fun on this blog as I learn F#.
So just what is a DSL:
A domain-specific language is a programming/specification language customized to a particular problem domain.
This is quite an old concept as special purpose languages for modeling have always existed but recently have had a surge of emergence once again due to most newly created systems needing a more flexible way to extend logic used without the need of a programmer.
Creating a DSL and the tools required to support it can be worthwhile if the language allows a particular type of problem to be expressed more clearly than existing languages would allow. An example of this is the issue of applying simple logic used to route a document for approval in a document management system.
Another example of the new generation of DSL’s are products/tools like cucumber (from the Ruby world to do BDD), and in the F#/C# world we have tools that are DSL' based such as NaturalSpec (also a BDD tool this time for F#).
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