Back from vacation, more on DSLs

It's been a long time since my last entry - those few who were following my blog have probably given up by now. The interruption in service has been due to (a) family vacation and (b) moving house. One of these days I'll wax lyrical about the inadequacies of the English system for buying and selling houses…

Let's just recap where I've got to so far on the theme of modelling languages and tools. I started out with a reaction to an article by Grady Booch on DSL's, in particular why UML is not really the right tool for the job if this is the direction you want to go. I then talked about code generation, my thoughts prompted by an interesting article by Dan Haywood. Then, in the third entry, I talked about designing a visual language (strictly we should say pictorial or graphical language, as a textual language is also visual), focusing on the difference between designing one on paper and one to be used in a tool.

So what next? Well I'd like to return to the topic of DSLs, in particular try to pin down what is meant by the term 'domain specific language', why we need them, and how we can make it easier to build them. As I seem to be incapable of writing short entries, I've hived off the main content to a separate article.