Domain-Specific Languages

As software developers, languages are one of the most fundamental and powerful tools at our disposal. When we say languages, we likely think of general-purpose programming languages (GPLs) such as Haskell, Python, and Java. While these GPLs differ in many ways, they have all been designed to tackle a wide range of tasks well, but not to excel at any one particular task. In other words, they are jacks of all trades, but masters of none. This is useful when we don’t know in advance what tasks we will face or when we are facing a wide range of different tasks. However, when the tasks we are facing are highly similar and drawn from the same problem domain, GPLs are not optimal. Indeed, we may end up repeating a lot of scaffolding code across tasks and be unnecessarily distracted from the task at hand.

This is where domain-specific languages (DSLs) come in. A DSL is a language that has been designed to excel at a particular kind of task, or a range of...