Re: October PragPub released

On Thu, 8 Oct 2009, Michael Swaine wrote:

> The October issue of PragPub, the free magazine from The Pragmatic 
> Programmers, is out. http://www.pragprog.com/magazines/
> Michael Swaine mike-FXEG14/[email protected]

I wonder what is this DSL era that you are talking about. I have the 
impression that the defining feature of the DSL era is that 
general-purpose languages have become so deeply entrenched and powerful, 
that anything else that programmers do sticks out as being a DSL... and 
even things that are strictly speaking just uses of a general-purpose 
language get hailed as some kind of DSL... not so much of the syntax of 
Rails doesn't fit the syntax of plain Ruby, so why would Rails itself be 
called a DSL, instead of saying that Rails includes (or can be used with) 
some small DSLs ?

So isn't this instead simply a more language-conscious era? Or perhaps a 
language-confused era. Or perhaps it's the same thing. Is «language» just 
the new way to say «API» ?

What's an internal DSL ? I mean, how does one tell apart an internal DSL 
from just an API, in well-defined formal terms? Some way to distinguish 
DSL from non-DSL... I'm really wondering about this.

  _ _ __ ___ _____ ________ _____________ _____________________ ...
| Mathieu Bouchard, Montréal, Québec. téléphone: +1.514.383.3801