6 ms·

Martin Fowler's Domain-Specific Languages book is out

63 points by praeclarum 16y ago

tjpick 16y ago
on amazon: http://www.amazon.com/Domain-Specific-Languages-Addison-Wesley-Signature-Martin/dp/0321712943/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1286241603&sr=8-1 http://www.amazon.com/Domain-Specific-Languages-Addison-Wesl...
joe_the_user 16y ago
Martin Fowler seems so 2008. To think I believed him that TDD was a good idea... It seems so far in the past. I vote MF take Zed Shaw up on his ring match offer. At least ZS has an honest job now, soaking up government-guarantee student loans while MF seems to still be rolling ignorant corporations with his "experience"...
darnton 16y ago
I bought this book as a "Rough Cut" a few months ago. If you want a very high-level introduction to the field of DSLs this book may be for you but don't expect to be able to do much useful after reading it. It really is just the 50,000 ft view. I was disappointed because I wanted to get my hands dirty and so I got The Definitive ANTLR Reference a day or two later. While it has nothing like the breadth of Fowler's DSLs it has enough depth to be very useful. http://www.pragprog.com/titles/tpantlr/the-definitive-antlr-reference http://www.pragprog.com/titles/tpantlr/the-definitive-antlr-...
- Confusion 16y ago
  As a newcomer to writing DSL's, I found the book very valuable as an introduction to all the intricacies that can be involved in writing a useful, nicely integrating, DSL. The abstraction of the 'semantic model', which Fowler advocates strongly, has proven indispensable, allowing me to easily build GUI-based DSL editor for an initially completely text-based DSL, without changing a single bit in the code executing the parsed DSL. Incidentally, this book and the definitive ANTLR reference are exactly the two books that appeared on my radar when searching for literature in DSL's.
poet 16y ago
Or you could just read Chapter 4 of SICP: http://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/full-text/book/book-Z-H-25.html#%_chap_4 http://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/full-text/book/book-Z-H-25.html..., the first edition of which was published 26 years ago.
- btilly 16y ago
  I found pg's On Lisp to be more enlightening on this subject. Available for free at http://www.paulgraham.com/onlisp.html http://www.paulgraham.com/onlisp.html.
- purpledove 16y ago
  This is an excellent suggestion. Other suggestions: read the wikipedia articles on Simple LR and General LR parsers; google "python descriptor" and read the top results.
  - Confusion 16y ago
    A parser does not a DSL make. I find this advice, and the advice of the parent, dangerous, as it suggests writing a DSL is just a, relatively simple, technical challenge. It is like advising the Dragon book and someone replying 'meh, just read SICP'. As in that case, SICP or articles on LR parsers do not even remotely stack up to the Fowler DSL book combined with the ANTLR reference.
    - poet 16y ago
      Two things: (1) classifying Chapter 4 of SICP as a chapter about parsing is just plain wrong and (2) Fowler's DSL book just came out; by definition you simply can't place it in the same class as the Dragon book. I think if you actually read Chapter 4 you would have a much different opinion. There's nothing "simple" about it. If you actually grok Chapter 4 then you grok Lisp. After that, it becomes apparent that the phrase "Domain Specific Language" is really just unnecessary terminology.
      - Confusion 16y ago
gruseom 16y ago
Perhaps someone who knows this material can advise us about something. I just looked through the linked ToC and am surprised that nearly everything is about DSL internals. Example: Express statement sub-elements of a function call by putting them into a closure in an argument. This is all easy stuff! The hard part is figuring out what a DSL should be. For all the hype about them, there are precious few examples of good ones. The successful ones are nearly always purely technical things like regular expressions that, while marvelous, do not even attempt to deliver on the promise of accessibility to domain experts. By far the majority are junk because they do a poor job of modeling the domain. This has little to do with closures or even parsers. To focus on such details is to take the easy way out (though I suppose it might sell more books to programmers infatuated with the idea of DSLs, who are more interested in, say, syntax-directed translation than in insurance or crop yields). When asked what they thought of Elvis Costello, the Sex Pistols replied, "He wears glasses without any actual glass in them." Surely Martin Fowler has not written a Domain Specific Language book without any actual Domain in it?
- wlievens 16y ago
  I interned at a language engineering research lab in 2003-2005 and I heard the exact same sentiment about DSL's from most people working there. All the typical examples are techie languages (SQL, Rake, ...). I've almost never seen a non-techie DSL whereas that is ultimately the promise of the concept. It's sad the DSL story has barely changed in seven years. I haven't read the DSL book, but if it's about parser/evaluator technicalities as you claim, one might as well (re)read SICP.
- Parabola 16y ago
  I haven't read it, but this may be up your alley: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/193435645X/ref=s9_cxhsh_co_ir06?pf_rd_m=ATVPDKIKX0DER&pf_rd_s=left-2&pf_rd_r=1VABHEGVDYRMHDWKY0MS&pf_rd_t=3201&pf_rd_p=1263271402&pf_rd_i=typ01 http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/193435645X/ref=s9_cxhsh_co_...
Tichy 16y ago
Needs web design
gruseom 16y ago
I noticed another thing about this book. The index has a dozen or so references to Lisp, but no mention of Forth. This is unfortunate. I bet there are more true DSLs in production in Forth systems than Lisp ones. They're scattered throughout the industrial world. Real people, i.e. with no knowledge of computing who are simply at work in their domain, use them to do things like calibrate lathes. Since the main thing we need if DSLs are to become more than design patterns squared (a technical scourge making things unnecessarily complicated for years to come) are real working examples, it's bad to ignore the richest source thereof. Of course this is one of the hard things about writing about software; where are you going to find such examples? On the other hand, I don't think people try very hard. The DSL philosophy runs as deep in Forth as it does in Lisp. Consider this passage from Thinking Forth: "Programming languages designed especially for particular applications such as robotics, inventory control, statistics, etc., are known as 'application-oriented languages'. FORTH is a programming environment for creating application-oriented languages. (That last sentence may be the most succinct description of FORTH that you'll find.) In fact, you shouldn't write any serious application in FORTH; as a language it's simply not powerful enough. What you should do is write your own languages in FORTH (lexicons) to model your understanding of the problem, in which you can elegantly describe its solution." That's from 1984. Yeah, that's right: 19 freaking 84. Has there ever been a clearer description of the idea?
- silentbicycle 16y ago
  _Thinking Forth_ - discusses a bunch of ideas that didn't become popular until Fowler et. al invented them. (Incremental development, (re)"factoring", etc.) A lot of those ideas came from cross-pollination between the Forth and Smalltalk communities, didn't they? Just like many others came from Lisp.
  - gruseom 16y ago
    Please assure me you omitted quotes from "invented" in some kind of ironic seizure. :) I'm not aware of any interaction between the Forth and Smalltalk communities, nor did I ever hear Forth referenced in oral histories along the Smalltalk->XP axis. It would be interesting if this were true. I bet your question reduces approximately to, "Was Ward Cunningham a Forth hacker?" Moore was influenced by both APL and (especially) Lisp, which he studied with McCarthy. But Forth predates Smalltalk, and the two moved in very different circles. Still do I guess. While I'm at it, I've been meaning to write the following down somewhere. Out of the great small, regular languages (Lisp, Smalltalk, APL, Forth, is that it?) Forth stands out as the only one that originated in working hackerdom and not a research environment. Forth is the incarnation of that design style in the land of the Von Neumann architecture, doubtless because Moore was a working programmer all those years, just trying to get things done. The remarkability of this fact has yet to be appreciated. Consider Lisp by contrast: it began existence far away from the machine and has been trying to find its way back ever since (or bring the machine up to it). With Lisp, bottom-up programming nonetheless starts pretty high up; Forth starts at rock bottom. That's important, and I wish more of us (myself included) had a better grasp of it. One could do worse than to make it the introduction to computing, or at least teach it alongside Scheme/Python/etc. I think it would be very exciting to young hackers to begin at the beginning in this way.
pella 16y ago
The link has changed? http://martinfowler.com/dslwip-gone.html http://martinfowler.com/dslwip-gone.html "Now that my book on Domain Specific Languages is published, I have taken down the online drafts from my web site"

63 points by praeclarum 16y ago

on amazon: http://www.amazon.com/Domain-Specific-Languages-Addison-Wesley-Signature-Martin/dp/0321712943/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1286241603&sr=8-1 http://www.amazon.com/Domain-Specific-Languages-Addison-Wesl...

joe_the_user 16y ago

Martin Fowler seems so 2008. To think I believed him that TDD was a good idea... It seems so far in the past. I vote MF take Zed Shaw up on his ring match offer. At least ZS has an honest job now, soaking up government-guarantee student loans while MF seems to still be rolling ignorant corporations with his "experience"...

darnton 16y ago

I bought this book as a "Rough Cut" a few months ago. If you want a very high-level introduction to the field of DSLs this book may be for you but don't expect to be able to do much useful after reading it. It really is just the 50,000 ft view. I was disappointed because I wanted to get my hands dirty and so I got The Definitive ANTLR Reference a day or two later. While it has nothing like the breadth of Fowler's DSLs it has enough depth to be very useful. http://www.pragprog.com/titles/tpantlr/the-definitive-antlr-reference http://www.pragprog.com/titles/tpantlr/the-definitive-antlr-...

Confusion 16y ago
As a newcomer to writing DSL's, I found the book very valuable as an introduction to all the intricacies that can be involved in writing a useful, nicely integrating, DSL. The abstraction of the 'semantic model', which Fowler advocates strongly, has proven indispensable, allowing me to easily build GUI-based DSL editor for an initially completely text-based DSL, without changing a single bit in the code executing the parsed DSL. Incidentally, this book and the definitive ANTLR reference are exactly the two books that appeared on my radar when searching for literature in DSL's.

poet 16y ago

Or you could just read Chapter 4 of SICP: http://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/full-text/book/book-Z-H-25.html#%_chap_4 http://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/full-text/book/book-Z-H-25.html..., the first edition of which was published 26 years ago.

btilly 16y ago
I found pg's On Lisp to be more enlightening on this subject. Available for free at http://www.paulgraham.com/onlisp.html http://www.paulgraham.com/onlisp.html.
purpledove 16y ago
This is an excellent suggestion. Other suggestions: read the wikipedia articles on Simple LR and General LR parsers; google "python descriptor" and read the top results.
- Confusion 16y ago
  A parser does not a DSL make. I find this advice, and the advice of the parent, dangerous, as it suggests writing a DSL is just a, relatively simple, technical challenge. It is like advising the Dragon book and someone replying 'meh, just read SICP'. As in that case, SICP or articles on LR parsers do not even remotely stack up to the Fowler DSL book combined with the ANTLR reference.
  - poet 16y ago
    Two things: (1) classifying Chapter 4 of SICP as a chapter about parsing is just plain wrong and (2) Fowler's DSL book just came out; by definition you simply can't place it in the same class as the Dragon book. I think if you actually read Chapter 4 you would have a much different opinion. There's nothing "simple" about it. If you actually grok Chapter 4 then you grok Lisp. After that, it becomes apparent that the phrase "Domain Specific Language" is really just unnecessary terminology.
    - Confusion 16y ago

gruseom 16y ago

Perhaps someone who knows this material can advise us about something. I just looked through the linked ToC and am surprised that nearly everything is about DSL internals. Example: Express statement sub-elements of a function call by putting them into a closure in an argument. This is all easy stuff! The hard part is figuring out what a DSL should be. For all the hype about them, there are precious few examples of good ones. The successful ones are nearly always purely technical things like regular expressions that, while marvelous, do not even attempt to deliver on the promise of accessibility to domain experts. By far the majority are junk because they do a poor job of modeling the domain. This has little to do with closures or even parsers. To focus on such details is to take the easy way out (though I suppose it might sell more books to programmers infatuated with the idea of DSLs, who are more interested in, say, syntax-directed translation than in insurance or crop yields). When asked what they thought of Elvis Costello, the Sex Pistols replied, "He wears glasses without any actual glass in them." Surely Martin Fowler has not written a Domain Specific Language book without any actual Domain in it?

wlievens 16y ago
I interned at a language engineering research lab in 2003-2005 and I heard the exact same sentiment about DSL's from most people working there. All the typical examples are techie languages (SQL, Rake, ...). I've almost never seen a non-techie DSL whereas that is ultimately the promise of the concept. It's sad the DSL story has barely changed in seven years. I haven't read the DSL book, but if it's about parser/evaluator technicalities as you claim, one might as well (re)read SICP.
Parabola 16y ago
I haven't read it, but this may be up your alley: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/193435645X/ref=s9_cxhsh_co_ir06?pf_rd_m=ATVPDKIKX0DER&pf_rd_s=left-2&pf_rd_r=1VABHEGVDYRMHDWKY0MS&pf_rd_t=3201&pf_rd_p=1263271402&pf_rd_i=typ01 http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/193435645X/ref=s9_cxhsh_co_...

Tichy 16y ago

Needs web design

gruseom 16y ago

I noticed another thing about this book. The index has a dozen or so references to Lisp, but no mention of Forth. This is unfortunate. I bet there are more true DSLs in production in Forth systems than Lisp ones. They're scattered throughout the industrial world. Real people, i.e. with no knowledge of computing who are simply at work in their domain, use them to do things like calibrate lathes. Since the main thing we need if DSLs are to become more than design patterns squared (a technical scourge making things unnecessarily complicated for years to come) are real working examples, it's bad to ignore the richest source thereof. Of course this is one of the hard things about writing about software; where are you going to find such examples? On the other hand, I don't think people try very hard. The DSL philosophy runs as deep in Forth as it does in Lisp. Consider this passage from Thinking Forth: "Programming languages designed especially for particular applications such as robotics, inventory control, statistics, etc., are known as 'application-oriented languages'. FORTH is a programming environment for creating application-oriented languages. (That last sentence may be the most succinct description of FORTH that you'll find.) In fact, you shouldn't write any serious application in FORTH; as a language it's simply not powerful enough. What you should do is write your own languages in FORTH (lexicons) to model your understanding of the problem, in which you can elegantly describe its solution." That's from 1984. Yeah, that's right: 19 freaking 84. Has there ever been a clearer description of the idea?

silentbicycle 16y ago
_Thinking Forth_ - discusses a bunch of ideas that didn't become popular until Fowler et. al invented them. (Incremental development, (re)"factoring", etc.) A lot of those ideas came from cross-pollination between the Forth and Smalltalk communities, didn't they? Just like many others came from Lisp.
- gruseom 16y ago
  Please assure me you omitted quotes from "invented" in some kind of ironic seizure. :) I'm not aware of any interaction between the Forth and Smalltalk communities, nor did I ever hear Forth referenced in oral histories along the Smalltalk->XP axis. It would be interesting if this were true. I bet your question reduces approximately to, "Was Ward Cunningham a Forth hacker?" Moore was influenced by both APL and (especially) Lisp, which he studied with McCarthy. But Forth predates Smalltalk, and the two moved in very different circles. Still do I guess. While I'm at it, I've been meaning to write the following down somewhere. Out of the great small, regular languages (Lisp, Smalltalk, APL, Forth, is that it?) Forth stands out as the only one that originated in working hackerdom and not a research environment. Forth is the incarnation of that design style in the land of the Von Neumann architecture, doubtless because Moore was a working programmer all those years, just trying to get things done. The remarkability of this fact has yet to be appreciated. Consider Lisp by contrast: it began existence far away from the machine and has been trying to find its way back ever since (or bring the machine up to it). With Lisp, bottom-up programming nonetheless starts pretty high up; Forth starts at rock bottom. That's important, and I wish more of us (myself included) had a better grasp of it. One could do worse than to make it the introduction to computing, or at least teach it alongside Scheme/Python/etc. I think it would be very exciting to young hackers to begin at the beginning in this way.

pella 16y ago

The link has changed? http://martinfowler.com/dslwip-gone.html http://martinfowler.com/dslwip-gone.html "Now that my book on Domain Specific Languages is published, I have taken down the online drafts from my web site"