Often the necessity to rapidly adapt software projects to new clients’ needs results in adopting approaches focused on productivity. Reasons, implications and limitations of this were recently discussed in the blog sphere.
January 5, 2008
December 21, 2007
Separating business logic from technology: Kathleen Dollard on a new view of code generation
Even the most successful project becomes a failure when a new technology comes out and everything has to be rewritten from the ground. This is why business logic has to be separated from technology. And, according to Kathleen Dollard, code generation is a promising approach to achieve it.
September 24, 2007
Charles Simonyi reveals production use of Intentional Software @ JAOO
Floyd Marinescu did a good summary of Simonyi’s presentation on JAOO and posted it on IinfoQ
http://www.infoq.com/news/2007/09/intentional-at-jaoo
It seems that guys at Intentional software are having something that works seriously, in real world business.
September 19, 2007
Domain Specific Languages are technology-agnostic, a more mature representation of their specific domain
One of the most important properties of Domain Specific Languages is that it is an abstraction which is technology-agnostic. We know how often technology changes, adopting new frameworks, discarding old used ones. DSLs keep evolving to be a more and more mature abstraction of the domain. And integration of the new technologies and frameworks becomes nothing more than implementation details behind this abstraction. It forms a kind of specification of the sub domains.
August 7, 2007
DSLs bringing the end of single language development?
My second contribution in InfoQ. An interesting news post about DSLs, and language oriented programming.
July 29, 2007
OBSEV :: Java or C# do not fit as a host language for DSLs, Lua is a better alternative to use as an IL in a Meta programming System
 
Recently, I’ve been playing a lot with Meta programming System of JetBrains. I feel that it has a lot in common with my idea of Paradigm Oriented Programming. In the way that it defines the language by links, adjectives and things (i.e. dimensions) that form together an abstraction as a language for a certain domain.
The package comes with Java already implemented, that can be quite handy, as it makes it easy for us to embed languages and concepts inside Java. But there is something that bothers me here; does Java (or even C#) work as an IL, a basic flexible language that other designed DSL will be interpreted to? Actually I strongly doubt that. First of all Java syntax comes already with a lot of constrains, static typing, curly brackets and a lot of other imitations.
Another thing is that Java itself is already an implementation of an abstraction. That is OOP. And fitting everything into OOP will force our DSL to respect that style of programming and to be constrained by it. Java is so static, and neither flexible not dynamic enough to have DSLs built on it.
Fortunately JetBrains’s MPS is not exclusive for java. It rather can be used with any other programming language. Because what it does is to build a coherent structure of text with its grammar in a syntax tree. Then it allows text to be generated out of properties of the syntax.
I thought a lot about a language that can be flexible enough, so that we can build abstractions that can be easily interpreted and implemented into that language’s syntax. I guess Lua is a good candidate. I believe that the way it is built permits a lot of dynamism for implementing meta-systems and making them co-exist in a paradigm oriented programming (See OOP implementation in Lua).
I still see some improvements still can be added to it. But for now I see it a perfect fit as an intermediate language for my POP.
