6 ms·

Anyone who thinks DSLs for the general public can't work has never used Excel. The real trick is creating a domain model that "clicks" in the heads of your user

by zwkrt 7y ago

Anyone who thinks DSLs for the general public can't work has never used Excel. The real trick is creating a domain model that "clicks" in the heads of your users.

christophilus 7y ago
I came to say that exact thing. Good DSLs are almost unnoticed, because they are frictionless.
- sligor 7y ago
  Good DSL are hard and expensive to design and maintain. Look at the good example of DSL in comments here. They are not small project with small workforce. If not very limited, a DSL is an ambitious project (if very limited a GUI will surely do a better Job). Developers should think twice before writing a DSL for "non-programmers"
  - hhas01 7y ago
    Nonsense. Making a good DSL is easy. I’ve built production DSLs that users adore. What’s hard is finding developers who know the domain and its users in the first place. You can’t solve a problem if you don’t understand the problem space. And most devs don’t understand shit except how to turn it off and on again, nor are they willing to learn. So if your average professional university-educated programmer can’t even get a simple turnkey CRUD app right, what chance of them delivering a tool that successfully hands those keys to its users? .. Go read the “Collaborative Work Practices” chapter of “A Small Matter of Programming: Perspectives on End User Computing” by Bonnie A Nardie that describes how basic users, expert users, and trained developers can develop their own software tools together, where each layer supports and educates the layers above and below it. And then count the number of programmers you know who’d embrace working like that. Sadly I doubt you’ll run out of fingers.
snarfy 7y ago
The counterpoint would be Visual Basic. It was meant for non-engineers/managers to be able to write programs, but that never really happened. It was always easier for a manager to write an email 'I need an app that does X' than to write the app themselves.
- ethbro 7y ago
  There's one key I've seen to DSLs that really work: scope your DSL with iron. You should be able to clearly say 'This DSL can do X. It cannot do Y.' (Then, if Y sometimes needs to get done, provide an escape hatch integration point to C et al.: but don't ever expand your DSL beyond the domain!)
  - zwkrt 7y ago
    You can see this with how VB became much more monstrous and complex as soon as they tried to shoehorn in a multi-table paradigm.
    - ethbro 7y ago
      I think later-legacy-VB (eg 6) suffers harshly from failing to properly separate primatives. Imho (open to disagreement), one should think incredibly hard before adding primatives to a DSL. Because what that's essentially saying is "My abstraction was incomplete over the target domain, and now I'm going to hack something in." And now you have a "domain + some other stuff" language, which starts to look like a general purpose language. SQL vs VB is an excellent example of focus. (Although I do think VB.net added sanity back to the mix, by saying more clearly "These are VB things" and "These are .net things", and if you want to do the latter in the former, just make a library call)
- quicklyfrozen 7y ago
  I saw VB6 used by many non-programmers. It often wasn't pretty, but got the job done (helped in no small part by a rich ecosystem of COM/ActiveX components).
- marcosdumay 7y ago
njharman 7y ago
The technical public. Huge percentage of the general public can't effectively use excel, let alone write code for it. To be clear by technical public I mean much more than just developers. Like everyone that could get a basic stem degree whether they have one or not.
- Semiapies 7y ago
  I wouldn't go as far as that, but yeah. Adding up a column is not the same as actually coding in Excel or even using a few math functions in a cell. And considering how many people take classes just to handle the basis spreadsheet functions, much less anything complicated, the naive accessibility of Excel can be overstated. I've never tried to make a DSL for non-technical people because every single time I've seen a client get an expensive product aimed at their industry and designed to "not need a programmer" to customize, they end up paying to have me or a coworker to not-program customizations for them in an excruciating interface. On the other hand, I think a lot of this side stems from insistent terminology in treating programmers like some tiny priesthood separate from the general public. That woman who can actually put together fairly complicated SQL queries? She has learned to program in SQL. That guy who put together a ramshackle VBA atrocity that gets the job done? He has learned to program in VBA. All the mess comes from not accepting that. No DSL or templating interface or whatever will let people do programming without learning how to program to some little extent. Acceptance fails when the "public" doesn't want to give/can't spare the time and effort to do so. On the flip side, when it doesn't fail because the "public" does work to learn to program in some case, developers take that to mean that this can work in any case, so long as the public is approached properly with the right DSL/graphical environment/etc.
  - derefr 7y ago
    > designed to "not need a programmer" to customize > they end up paying to have me or a coworker to not-program customizations These things aren't contradictory, though. The software doesn't need a programmer to customize. They likely tested that, and proved that regular people can set it up just fine. Regular people just aren't normally motivated to do so, when it's so easy to just spend money in order to not have to learn something new. IMHO there's a clear division that forms between people very early in life, and it can be predicted which side of the line someone falls on as early as the third grade: there are humans for whom solving puzzles that involve "wrapping their brains around" a new mental skill is a fun diversion; and there are humans for whom that same experience is aversive and something they will flinch away from. And—importantly—this has nothing to do with how good they are at doing it! We can endlessly invent new ways to make hard things easy, but no matter how easy we make them, as long as they're at all novel or unfamiliar, the people for whom absorbing new mental models is an aversive experience will just do everything they can to avoid it. It's like people with social anxiety doing way more work of some other type to avoid socializing, but with "forming new mental connections" in place of socializing. But the fact that a large part of the population is like this, doesn't mean that there's no value in these customizable systems. They still increase accessibility, bringing tasks that were impossible for a non-programmer into the realm of possibility! It's just that for most people, the line isn't between "possible" and "impossible"; it's between "trivial" and "not worth the trouble." The question only becomes one of possibility when you're forced into a corner of solving the problem yourself, no matter what, unable to even quit and walk away. When people are in that situation, they're thankful for these systems. But only then.
lordnacho 7y ago
> Anyone who thinks DSLs for the general public can't work has never used Excel. I would say Excel is exactly the opposite of a positive example. Unless you mean being used as a sort of electronic scratchpad, which works okay. But apart from that there's too much freedom in Excel to be used to make anything properly. Every time I've ever seen a non programmer use it, they make a pile of spaghetti. You never have any assurance that you're actually calculating what you want. Even highly qualified domain experts (eg in derivatives trading) will end up building utter nonsense in Excel, and then use it to trade millions of dollars worth of exotics. Whenever they need something fixed, it takes an enormous effort to trace through all the cells to make sure things are correct.
- coldtea 7y ago
  >I would say Excel is exactly the opposite of a positive example. Unless you mean being used as a sort of electronic scratchpad, which works okay. That's just developer snobbism. Millions non-devs use Excel with excellent results, even whole business of billions depend on it. (Excel has some flaws, and can give wrong results in some cases, but that's like "gotchas" in any language).
  - IshKebab 7y ago
    I don't think it is snobbishness. Some programming systems definitely encourage hacky spaghetti more than others (if you don't believe me try using LabVIEW) and Excel is definitely in that category. There are ways that they could make it less so, like only allowing cell references by name, using a saner scripting language than VBA, allowing multiple cell grids on a single page/sheet, etc. "Millions of successful businesses are built on Excel" is no argument at all. You can build a successful business with pen and paper.
    - mycall 7y ago
      Excel checks the "good enough" box and while you have a point, it isn't going away.
    - taeric 7y ago
scroot 7y ago
Or Hypercard, which was popular among non-programmers in its day
- taeric 7y ago
  There is a great article that explained how an entire office was comfortable with LISP because it wasn't pushed as programming. First hit searching shows it linked off of: https://www.reddit.com/r/emacs/comments/3tj71x/even_office_secretaries_learn_lisp_why_do_the/ https://www.reddit.com/r/emacs/comments/3tj71x/even_office_s...

by zwkrt 7y ago

Anyone who thinks DSLs for the general public can't work has never used Excel. The real trick is creating a domain model that "clicks" in the heads of your users.

christophilus 7y ago

I came to say that exact thing. Good DSLs are almost unnoticed, because they are frictionless.

sligor 7y ago
Good DSL are hard and expensive to design and maintain. Look at the good example of DSL in comments here. They are not small project with small workforce. If not very limited, a DSL is an ambitious project (if very limited a GUI will surely do a better Job). Developers should think twice before writing a DSL for "non-programmers"
- hhas01 7y ago
  Nonsense. Making a good DSL is easy. I’ve built production DSLs that users adore. What’s hard is finding developers who know the domain and its users in the first place. You can’t solve a problem if you don’t understand the problem space. And most devs don’t understand shit except how to turn it off and on again, nor are they willing to learn. So if your average professional university-educated programmer can’t even get a simple turnkey CRUD app right, what chance of them delivering a tool that successfully hands those keys to its users? .. Go read the “Collaborative Work Practices” chapter of “A Small Matter of Programming: Perspectives on End User Computing” by Bonnie A Nardie that describes how basic users, expert users, and trained developers can develop their own software tools together, where each layer supports and educates the layers above and below it. And then count the number of programmers you know who’d embrace working like that. Sadly I doubt you’ll run out of fingers.

snarfy 7y ago

The counterpoint would be Visual Basic. It was meant for non-engineers/managers to be able to write programs, but that never really happened. It was always easier for a manager to write an email 'I need an app that does X' than to write the app themselves.

ethbro 7y ago
There's one key I've seen to DSLs that really work: scope your DSL with iron. You should be able to clearly say 'This DSL can do X. It cannot do Y.' (Then, if Y sometimes needs to get done, provide an escape hatch integration point to C et al.: but don't ever expand your DSL beyond the domain!)
- zwkrt 7y ago
  You can see this with how VB became much more monstrous and complex as soon as they tried to shoehorn in a multi-table paradigm.
  - ethbro 7y ago
    I think later-legacy-VB (eg 6) suffers harshly from failing to properly separate primatives. Imho (open to disagreement), one should think incredibly hard before adding primatives to a DSL. Because what that's essentially saying is "My abstraction was incomplete over the target domain, and now I'm going to hack something in." And now you have a "domain + some other stuff" language, which starts to look like a general purpose language. SQL vs VB is an excellent example of focus. (Although I do think VB.net added sanity back to the mix, by saying more clearly "These are VB things" and "These are .net things", and if you want to do the latter in the former, just make a library call)
quicklyfrozen 7y ago
I saw VB6 used by many non-programmers. It often wasn't pretty, but got the job done (helped in no small part by a rich ecosystem of COM/ActiveX components).
marcosdumay 7y ago

njharman 7y ago

The technical public. Huge percentage of the general public can't effectively use excel, let alone write code for it. To be clear by technical public I mean much more than just developers. Like everyone that could get a basic stem degree whether they have one or not.

Semiapies 7y ago
I wouldn't go as far as that, but yeah. Adding up a column is not the same as actually coding in Excel or even using a few math functions in a cell. And considering how many people take classes just to handle the basis spreadsheet functions, much less anything complicated, the naive accessibility of Excel can be overstated. I've never tried to make a DSL for non-technical people because every single time I've seen a client get an expensive product aimed at their industry and designed to "not need a programmer" to customize, they end up paying to have me or a coworker to not-program customizations for them in an excruciating interface. On the other hand, I think a lot of this side stems from insistent terminology in treating programmers like some tiny priesthood separate from the general public. That woman who can actually put together fairly complicated SQL queries? She has learned to program in SQL. That guy who put together a ramshackle VBA atrocity that gets the job done? He has learned to program in VBA. All the mess comes from not accepting that. No DSL or templating interface or whatever will let people do programming without learning how to program to some little extent. Acceptance fails when the "public" doesn't want to give/can't spare the time and effort to do so. On the flip side, when it doesn't fail because the "public" does work to learn to program in some case, developers take that to mean that this can work in any case, so long as the public is approached properly with the right DSL/graphical environment/etc.
- derefr 7y ago
  > designed to "not need a programmer" to customize > they end up paying to have me or a coworker to not-program customizations These things aren't contradictory, though. The software doesn't need a programmer to customize. They likely tested that, and proved that regular people can set it up just fine. Regular people just aren't normally motivated to do so, when it's so easy to just spend money in order to not have to learn something new. IMHO there's a clear division that forms between people very early in life, and it can be predicted which side of the line someone falls on as early as the third grade: there are humans for whom solving puzzles that involve "wrapping their brains around" a new mental skill is a fun diversion; and there are humans for whom that same experience is aversive and something they will flinch away from. And—importantly—this has nothing to do with how good they are at doing it! We can endlessly invent new ways to make hard things easy, but no matter how easy we make them, as long as they're at all novel or unfamiliar, the people for whom absorbing new mental models is an aversive experience will just do everything they can to avoid it. It's like people with social anxiety doing way more work of some other type to avoid socializing, but with "forming new mental connections" in place of socializing. But the fact that a large part of the population is like this, doesn't mean that there's no value in these customizable systems. They still increase accessibility, bringing tasks that were impossible for a non-programmer into the realm of possibility! It's just that for most people, the line isn't between "possible" and "impossible"; it's between "trivial" and "not worth the trouble." The question only becomes one of possibility when you're forced into a corner of solving the problem yourself, no matter what, unable to even quit and walk away. When people are in that situation, they're thankful for these systems. But only then.

lordnacho 7y ago

> Anyone who thinks DSLs for the general public can't work has never used Excel. I would say Excel is exactly the opposite of a positive example. Unless you mean being used as a sort of electronic scratchpad, which works okay. But apart from that there's too much freedom in Excel to be used to make anything properly. Every time I've ever seen a non programmer use it, they make a pile of spaghetti. You never have any assurance that you're actually calculating what you want. Even highly qualified domain experts (eg in derivatives trading) will end up building utter nonsense in Excel, and then use it to trade millions of dollars worth of exotics. Whenever they need something fixed, it takes an enormous effort to trace through all the cells to make sure things are correct.

coldtea 7y ago
>I would say Excel is exactly the opposite of a positive example. Unless you mean being used as a sort of electronic scratchpad, which works okay. That's just developer snobbism. Millions non-devs use Excel with excellent results, even whole business of billions depend on it. (Excel has some flaws, and can give wrong results in some cases, but that's like "gotchas" in any language).
- IshKebab 7y ago
  I don't think it is snobbishness. Some programming systems definitely encourage hacky spaghetti more than others (if you don't believe me try using LabVIEW) and Excel is definitely in that category. There are ways that they could make it less so, like only allowing cell references by name, using a saner scripting language than VBA, allowing multiple cell grids on a single page/sheet, etc. "Millions of successful businesses are built on Excel" is no argument at all. You can build a successful business with pen and paper.
  - mycall 7y ago
    Excel checks the "good enough" box and while you have a point, it isn't going away.
  - taeric 7y ago

scroot 7y ago

Or Hypercard, which was popular among non-programmers in its day

taeric 7y ago
There is a great article that explained how an entire office was comfortable with LISP because it wasn't pushed as programming. First hit searching shows it linked off of: https://www.reddit.com/r/emacs/comments/3tj71x/even_office_secretaries_learn_lisp_why_do_the/ https://www.reddit.com/r/emacs/comments/3tj71x/even_office_s...