DSLs are a waste of time | lbr.
leebriggs.co.uk
If you’ve read this blog before, or are unfortunate enough to have an actual personal relationship with me, you’ll know that I have strong opinions and can be, shall we

TLDR: terraform bad, pulumi good

  • Charliebeans@slrpnk.net
    1·
    10 months ago

    I don’t think DSLs are a waste of time, just a stepping stone in a quite new IT paradigm. A lot of things will die until IaC stabilizes.

    I’m more fearing ever increasing reliance on Cloud Providers. Trust and power that we are giving these companies is getting insane and I hope I’m wrong but it will bite all of our butts big time. I hope all of IaC tools will create more tools to have better power balance.

          • onlinepersona@programming.devEnglish
            1·
            10 months ago

            LUA is a programming language. Being embeddable doesn’t stop something from being a DSL. It’s not an attribute that should factor in the distinction between DSL and general purpose programming language.

            • nikaro@jlai.luOP
              1·
              10 months ago

              Ok i think i get the point. A “generic programming language” could be used as a “domain specific language” in some context. Is that what you mean?

  • Reptorian@programming.dev
    1·
    10 months ago

    Here’s my opinion, a well-developed DSL could even be arguably more flexible than say Python even with existing libraries on their specific domains. So, if one is just limited to domains, they may be very well be preferable to general languages.

    I have coded in C#, Python, C++, and currently nearly everyday, G’MIC. Which one of those are a DSL? The last one. What it is? It’s a Domain-Specific Language that has been geared toward raster graphics image processing. Why do I use it? Looking at the stack-based processing, commands, built-in mathematical functions. It seems that it has a lot more things that are built-in than say Pillow library for Python and other things. And I only do create images with code, so I am happy with this, and I even did things like Python itertools combinatorics with more things like rank2list/list2rank variation of those combinatorics which aren’t image processing by themselves, but can aid to it.

    If I feel that it is way too limited for that Domain, then I wouldn’t use it. DSLs are only good if the other options are much more difficult to build with and their flexibility are often enough to entice their audience which is one with limited use cases. Of course, generic languages are usually better even than most DSL even within their domains because of wider support, and wider audience. More DSLs would be better than generics given enough time and support for their domains in my opinion.

  • MrJay@programming.dev
    1·
    10 months ago

    I thought I was going to disagree at first, because I am forced to use multiple DSLs for several projects I work on, however after I thought about it I hate the those DSL’s because they are not actual programming languages they are overly restrictive. more limiting than assembly, thus why I am using an actual language to create my own DSL that mainly uses the language as its host, so its not really a full DSL just a few extra functions on top of an actual language. so surprisingly I pretty much agree.

    I would say Elixir, Ocaml, Rust, Haskell, Scheme, Clojure, Common Lisp all have great examples of large and small DSL’s that are very convenient, I would also include libraries as DSLs a C example would be something like Raylib, or SDL, and I would consider the code below an example of a micro DSL in Common Lisp.

        (loop for i from 0 to 100 by 2
              for x from 10 by 10
              do (print (list i x)))

    so I think I mostly agree.