Customers often ask me: what is a DSL? How is a language different from … and then they mention all kinds of other terms. This is a great topic for discussions at academic workshops or evenings over drinks (the latter probably more productive), so I could write pages and pages…

When I was growing up as a programmer, it was the time of object-oriented-everything. You were first supposed to do object-oriented analysis (where you you tried to understand the part of the system/domain you were about to implement), then there was object-oriented design (where you’d come up with the program…

DSL design requires that you first understand the domain for which you want to build the language, so the analysis of how stuff works is a huge part of my work. …

A couple of concrete steps to take — A customer recently asked me this: “We still lack a bit of acceptance among our users for the DSL. Can we chat a little bit about ways of teaching them how to use MPS and the DSL?” I suggested to ask their colleagues in their sister department, because they seem…

Or why so many DSL projects fail for non-technical reasons — Business Process Improvement with DSLs Most of my DSL-related projects are ultimately about business process improvement: we’re trying to improve the processes how subject matter finds its way into software. …

Why it isn’t enough for a DSL to just capture the domain. — This week I gave the talk for my ISOLA 2021 paper Programming vs. that thing subject matter experts do. Here’s a video of that presentation. One of the audience members pointed out that the point I am making in the presentation — that DSLs should be accessible to subject matter…

I often get the question: how do you test a language — or more specifically, a language implementation in a tool like MPS or Xtext. That’s a rich question, and the answer isn’t easily given in a few lines here. …

There’s a lot of discussion about lock-in relative to vendors and tools. I am confronted with these discussions in the context of domain-specific languages, because they rely on tools like Jetbrains MPS or Eclipse Xtext. If you build and use DSLs, you are locked into these tools. Is that a…

DSLs and Subject Matter Experts As you probably know, I spend my time developing domain-specific languages. In virtually all cases these languages are intended for use by people who are not trained programmers. They might be engineers, healthcare professionals, tax law experts or subject matter experts in various other fields. However, because their expertise is…