CodeMash kicked off this morning with Neal Ford doing his keynote on Domain-Specific Languages and Their Role in the Evolution of the Programming Paradigm. Neal presented some very interesting explanations of DSL types such as Waffle house having their own domain specific language when ordering hash browns: covered, smothered, chunked, etc. The idea behind domain specific language is we as humans describe complex abstractions in domain specific languages. Yet a lot of developers don’t translate their domain specific language to the problem they are trying to solve. Neal gave several examples of this in Java and C# where he created a Car object in code one way, and then applied DSL to the code which made it easier to understand, even for someone that doesn’t know how to read code. Very interesting.
A lot of Neal’s talk was built around Ruby on Rails and Ruby because of the lack of syntax in the language is great for domain specific languages. Lastly he went on to talk about Language Workbenches. Checkout his slide deck which will be posted to CodeMash if you aren’t at the conference.
He’s almost done and I have to present on Smart Clients next so I’m off to get setup. More to follow later on. Stay tuned.
Nice job on the presentation Keith! ClickOnce (especially the updating) looks pretty cool, something we could really use where I work.