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One of the challenges I have experienced when giving talks or blogging about domain specific languages is that developers are a little reluctant to writing code in languages they are unfamiliar with. This holds true even if the DSL in question is an external DSL based on commonly available languages such as Boo, Ruby, Groovy or ...

Fredrik Kalseth posted a notice about his talk for the Norwegian .NET User Group’s (NNUG) Vestfold’s chapter, so I thought I’d follow in his footsteps to inform the world about my speaking engagements next week. On Tuesday February 26th I’m giving a talk on language oriented programming with .NET for the Oslo chapter of ...

There is an article in this week’s Economist referring to a paper by Dr. Mark Pagel et al published in the latest edition of Science on (spoken) languages evolving in punctuational bursts. The key point in Dr. Pagel’s research is that evolutionary change happens in sudden jumps separated by long periods of creeping evolution. The ...

Last night I was unable to sleep, so I started reading Domain Specific Development with Visual Studio DSL Tools and I was immediately reminded of my rant about software factories. Just like with the software factories provided by the Patterns and Practices team, the examples in the book are bad examples of what you should use a visual DSL ...

My latest posts on DSLs caused a bit of a stir around the blogosphere. Some of of the more constructive debates have been on wether a fluent interface is just a fluent interface or if it can be labeled as a DSL. I have a consultant's answer to this; it depends. I my opinion my posts on the planning DSL concerns a DSL, even if it technically is ...

Last week I blogged about an embedded DSL for creating different calendar components like events and to do-tasks. For this post I'll let you in on some of the ''secrets'' of embedded DSL development in C#. Before we get started, let me refresh your memory with an example of how the DSL can be used:ToDoComponent planningTask = Plan.ToDo(''Plan ...

Back in May chromatic published a tongue-in-cheek checklist to determine whether your code is a DSL or an API. Regular readers know that I've done quite a bit of fooling around with various embedded DSLs in Java and I assure you that getting serious with embedded DSLs is contagious. Check out this snippet from a calendar integration framework I've ...