From: Chad Perrin <perrin@...>
Date: 2006-09-04T19:13:13+09:00
Subject: Re: Joel Spolsky on languages for web programming

On Mon, Sep 04, 2006 at 11:49:07AM +0900, M. Edward (Ed) Borasky wrote:
> 
> Rails and rake are internal DSLs, and Ruby makes internal DSL creation
> much easier than many other languages. I can't tell from this thread
> whether Wasabi is external or internal.

I'm having a hard time imagining it being internal, conidering the way
Joel describes it in an essay where he addresses Wasabi directly:
  http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2006/09/01b.html

I am, frankly, having a tough time imagining how he could have designed
a language that does what he claims as an internal DSL of VBScript.  In
fact, he describes it as "100% backwards-compatible with VBScript".

On the other hand, it seems utterly incomprehensible that someone would
recreate VBScript, but with more power, from scratch -- which is what
he'd have to do, considering I doubt Microsoft gave him the source for
it.


> 
> I hardly think of an external DSL as anything special any more. They've
> been around as long as I've been programming, which is -- well, let's
> just say your toaster has more compute power than the machine I learned
> on. :) Almost every major decades-old Fortran code, for example, is
> really implementing an external DSL.

In a manner of speaking, one might say that all programming languages
are, in one way or another, DSLs of a sort.

-- 
CCD CopyWrite Chad Perrin [ http://ccd.apotheon.org ]
"It's just incredible that a trillion-synapse computer could actually
spend Saturday afternoon watching a football game." - Marvin Minsky