language parallax

There’s another google video about DSL’s with Neal Ford of ThoughtWorks. Neal Ford has a website.

I’m not crazy about the trick behind the English-like calendar language in this talk. Initially as someone who’s studied formal natural grammars — because the right-descent parse trees aren’t the real parse trees. That may seem like an academic nit pick, but it becomes important to have the right parse tree when you get into defining refactorings and other program transormations. Not to mention round-tripping, structured/mixed editors, and diff/merge for source code control.

It’s true that having a very limited domain (as he suggests) mitigates this problem. I need to see more examples of these languages in practice before I decide how English-like these things should be.

I do like that he mentions language evolution (towards the end). Language transformation/evolution is going to be an important part of this paradigm.