Ben Galbraith has posted the first of a series of blog entries about How I Learned to Love Domain-Specific Languages. It's great that more and more people are starting to see the value of explicit, focused languages over ridiculously inhumane "formats" like XML. Hopefully, we're finally reaching a tipping point.

Explicit DSLs feel weird to a lot of programmers because there's been so little mainstream focus on them. I.e., as shown by one of the comments, developers have been herded and otherwise sucked in by shiny-looking tools (by poor education, management, laziness, peer-pressure, ignorance, lack of training, marketing hype, etc.) and haven't (consciously) realized the power of domain languages. It's amazingly odd to me how little energy has been applied to languages among mainstream developers given how much programmer time is spent arguing about the minutia of programming languages and tools.

The fact is that we're already surrounded by and are constantly implementing "DSLs". Look at the "language" of printf and friends, the declarative "specification" of makefiles, the myriad "protocols" that we deal with everyday like HTTP, SMTP, SSH, and FTP, the "APIs" of code libraries, the "design patterns" embodied in frameworks, the analogies and "metaphors" we use to described software architectures, the implicit languages that we create each time we define a class, the jargon we use to talk with each other, etc.

A big part of the problem that I see happening right now is that too much of the discussion around "DSLs" is being framed as some sort of "either/or" / "black/white" conflict when it's really just a more conscious and explicit approach to things that we've already been doing. Whether it's the hype juggernaut of Ruby on Rails or the Java is old, boring, bloated, etc. ideas exemplified by Beyond Java or the "IDE" wars between Eclipse, NetBeans, IntelliJ IDEA, and Emacs, or whatever, the biggest issue with this "us/them" thinking, IMHO, is that people are fighting the wrong fights. The leverage that matters most is the ability of developers to think and communicate clearly with themselves, each other, systems, business folks, and users. Biologically and sociologically, human are built to be linguistic.

That is, languages are fundamental to how we work internally and with each other. Sure, we have various tools to help us communicate but isn't it clear that e.g., PowerPoint isn't the point, it's just a tool — and, alas, a tool that usually induces poor communication rather than enriching conversations). On the other hand, look at the "modern" killer apps and how they are all about helping us (manage our) communicating: email, web, blogs, P2P, wifi, cell phones, faxes, VoIP, agile/XP, open source, etc. I.e., we've graduated from the elementary school building blocks (word processing, spreadsheets, databases, Belief of Control, etc.) to the middle school of communication. Now, we just need to learn and develop languages and tools built around this new level of understanding and put aside our old, comfortable, but ultimately dead-end habits.