QCon 2008 : Domain Specific Languages
Posted on March 10, 2008
Filed Under cognifide, development | 6 Comments
Today I spent my first day at QCon 2008 in a room with Martin Fowler, Neal Ford and Rebecca Parsons presenting their position on Domain Specific Languages, the results I’m sure will end up in a book.
For me, having sat through the tutorial, the headline moments for me were:
- Understanding what the differences are between an internal and external DSL
- Knowing when to select one over the other
- There is a lot of unknowns surrounding the whole area of DSLs, and what Fowler and Co are doing are exploring the problem space and proposing options.
- Some languages, Ruby, Groovy, Scala lend themselves more easily to writing readable internal DSLs
- Other languages, such as C# and Java, tend to pollute their DSLs with syntactical noise in the form of {}, “” and ()
- When the language is getting in your way, it’s time to more from internal to external
- DSLs are a layer on top of a framework that is used to setup and configure framework objects
- External DSLs free you from the constraints of a specific programming language but introduce an extra step in the form a parser generation code to your build
- There were a LOT of Ruby guys in the room, including the leads on rSpec, an internal DSL for Ruby testing
- The definition for DSLs is wide open for interpretation and a lot more will happen in the space over the coming months
- I need to do some more reading around the concept of a language workbenches. Very interesting stuff.
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6 Responses to “QCon 2008 : Domain Specific Languages”
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Hey man, good points. I was also there and put something together in a post on my blog. In my opinion it was awesome.
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I organise an annual conference around DSLs and other model-driven software development approaches.
The slides for this year’s event are available at:
http://www.codegeneration.net/conference/slides.php
We also did a couple of audio-recorded sessions at last year’s conference. See http://www.codegeneration.net/cg2009/previoushighlights.php
Next year’s event will run in June 2009 in Cambridge, not so far from London…
I organise an annual conference around DSLs and other model-driven software development approaches.
The slides for this year’s event are available at:
http://www.codegeneration.net/conference/slides.php
We also did a couple of audio-recorded sessions at last year’s conference. See http://www.codegeneration.net/cg2009/previoushighlights.php
Next year’s event will run in June 2009 in Cambridge, not so far from London…
[...] those of you interested in DSLs, Mark Dalagarno got in touch with me through my post on DSLs at QCon London 2008. Mark organises the CodeGeneration conference and has published all the conference slideware. There [...]
In case you can’t wait until next year’s conference we’re also running an evening event in Cambridge this month that includes Steven Kelly, author of “Domain-Specific Modelling: Enabling Full Code Generation” speaking on DSLs.
See http://www.software-east.co.uk/ for more details