Tracking change and innovation in the enterprise software development community
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Business users doing programming? Charles Simonyi and Henk Kolk presents how Intentional Software offers a radical new software approach that separates business knowledge from software engineering knowledge, which means that business experts can be more innovative and responsive to the changes in the domain.
There is a widespread opinion that a good DSL has to be English-like. Dave Thomas advocates against such approach asserting that DSL are not about getting as close as possible to natural languages and that having this as a guiding principle of DSL design can be rather detrimental. He also highlights what he believes is important in DSL design and provides some examples of successful DSL.
Achieving readability and expressiveness by writing English-like code is one of the trends on the rise in today’s industry. Michael Feathers advocates for considering other alternatives that can be instrumental for improving code expressiveness. He argues that in some circumstances symbolic approach is more appropriate than the narrative one and highlights some trades-offs between them.
Software-Engineering Radio, the "Podcast for Professional Software Developers" has published their exclusive interview of InfoQ's own Ruby editor Obie Fernandez about Domain Specific Languages (DSLs) and how Ruby facilitates writing internal DSLs.
Jay Fields, known for his cutting edge work defining BNLs (Business Natural Languages) delivers a code-rich explanation of eval, class_eval, and instance_eval, in the context of implementing domain-specific languages in Ruby.
Business users doing programming? In this interview, Charles Simonyi presents a radical new way of building software that separates business knowledge from software engineering knowledge. The claim is to simplify the creation process for software as business experts directly contribute using their customary domain description which results in accelerated innovation.
Jay Fields presents his concept of Business Natural Languages (BNL). BNLs are a type of Domain Specific Language, designed to be readable by any subject matter expert, which allows to create maintainable specifications and documentation. The example language is shown using Ruby.
The presentation shows how to involve on-site customers in the evolution of their DSL syntax and how it leads to higher-quality, more correct software. The process of moving from a draft DSL syntax to implementation via TDD will be explained in depth.
