Philadelphia Emerging Technologies for the Enterprise Conference

Speaker: Debasish Ghosh

Talk: DSLs: Does Expressiveness for Domain Experts Have to Compromise the Underlying Implementation?   

Eleventh in our ETE 2011 screencast series

The biggest benefit of DSL driven development is the ability to collaborate with your domain experts as well as your fellow programmers as you flesh out your APIs. A DSL needs to speak the language of the domain. But when you design a DSL, it’s not only the linguistic aspect that you need to consider – the underlying semantic model also has to be malleable enough. It’s how this model interacts with your language syntax that shapes your DSL implementation. The expressiveness of the language and the succinctness of implementation both depend a lot on the ability to design abstractions at the proper level.

When you want to design a DSL that models the ubiquitous language of the domain, there’s always a tension between the degree of expressiveness that you offer to your users and the ease and elegance of the underlying implementation. A successful DSL is one that finds the right compromise between the two forces. In this talk I will discuss how to design abstractions at the proper granularity so that they compose beautifully when you weave them during your language evolution.