January 2009 Entries
Last Friday Rocky posted an entry on his weblog entitled “DSLs – fun, cool, but maybe a bad idea?” and my reaction was: Maybe a bad idea? Maybe a bad idea? Of course they’re a bad idea! This may seem strange coming from someone who’s working on the heart of Oslo/M’s DSL capabilities, but stick with me here… To begin with, writing a new language, domain-specific or not, is a lot like opening a restaurant: everyone thinks they can do it because they’ve eaten at one and it looks like fun. But...
As I’m sure regular followers of my blog are aware, I have a weakness for disclaimers. As I’ve starting thinking about how I want to talk in more detail about how the MGrammar parser generator works, I felt compelled to make yet another disclaimer: I am not a computer science theorist. The field of parser generation is an old and storied one (at least, relative to a lot of other things having to do with computers) and there’s a lot of theory that’s built up around it. I simply ask my readers to keep in mind that I am...