What I was trying to say

[pozorvlak]

chromatic, in a conversation about domain-specific languages in Perl 6, put something I've been trying to say for a while into the correct words that would never quite come for me.
I can decipher and fix bad Ruby code, for example, because I know the underlying language.You know Ruby's syntax maybe, but who says you know the domain of the business

Comments

[pozorvlak]

True, alas. Maybe "embedded DSL" is useful as a marketing/evangelism tool to promote the benefits of sensible interfaces, data-driven programming and the rest of the grab-bag of techniques that seem to pass for "language design", just as AJAX was about slapping a cool name on existing (but somewhat rare) practices. But at least the AJAX guys were up-front about there being nothing particularly new in what they were doing.

But still. Regular expressions are programs in an embedded domain-specific language. Parse::RecDescent provides an embedded domain-specific language for specifying grammars. Most claimed "DSL"s are not, as far as I can see, useful though they may be.

Are you mostly doing Ruby stuff these days?

[pozorvlak]

It could be a lot worse - you could be writing C++ or something. I don't code much these days, but when I do it's mostly Haskell (with the odd Perl one-liner for text munging and sysadmining stuff), with occasional yearning glances in the direction of Lisp and impatient mutterings about Perl 6 :-)