Tuesday, May 09, 2006

Spreading the DSL Virus

Everywhere I go now (in a technical context anyway), I'm associated with the idea of Domain Specific Languages. At the No Fluff, Just Stuff expert panel this last weekend in Denver, my friend Scott Davis introduced me (we each introduced the member of the panel sitting on our right), and mostly what he said about me can be paraphrased as "he's the Typhoid Mary of DSL's". When I mentioned DSL's in answering a "Why is Ruby cool?" question, Ted Neward (the moderator) jokingly told me to not talk about it anymore.

But it's spreading further afield. I was at the Microsoft Technology Summit last week, and asked a DSL related question of Don Box when he was giving an Indigo talk. Afterwards, I chatted with him for a while about DSL's. Apparently, I got his attention. This week, he posted a blog entry looking for me to explain what the hell it was that I was talking about at MTS06. His blog entry and my reply is here. I pointed him to a great blog entry from my co-worker Jay Fields to illustrate to Don the power of this technique (found here).

As my regular reader(s) may know, I'm currently working on a book on DSLs for Pragmatic Press. The author team of Joe O'Brien, Jeremy Stell-Smith, Zak Tamsen, and myself are working hard to spread this virus far and wide.

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