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What not to model - a tale of DSLs
Microsoft infrastructure architect Jack Greenfield recently took a look at common drawbacks encountered in applying Domain-Specific Languages (DSLs). People are using DSLs to solve problems not suited to modeling, or they are using a single DSL to model too many diverse things. Greenfield’s article, Bare Naked Languages or What Not to Model, appears in the January issue of The Architecture Journal.
It seems on its face we may have returned to the very issue the DSL was meant to solve. How do we know which are the right cases in which to apply specific solutions or general solutions? The view of the best fit can vary from person to person.
Writes Greenfield: We see people using DSLs to solve problems that are not well suited to modeling, such as problems that can be solved more easily with other tools, or problems in poorly understood or rapidly-evolving domains, where reusable patterns and practices have not yet emerged or stabilized.
We also see people who are confused about what to model. This confusion is usually manifested by scoping problems. The two most common scoping problems are using a single DSL to capture information about too many different kinds of things, or to capture too many different kinds of information about the same thing, and factoring concepts poorly among multiple DSLs.
Greenfield, who previously served with Rational Software and who worked on Web objects at NeXT Computer, repeated the adage that tangling many different concerns in a single piece of code creates problems, and he noted that this notion applies to models as well as to code. Further, the gap between requirements and design, he indicated, must be spanned in different ways for different types of applications.
Are there best practices that can help you avoid these problems? That actually is the crux of Greenfield’s article, linked-to below.
http://www.architecturejournal.net/2006/issue9/F1_Bare
What do you think? A lot of ink and electrons have been used up on the topic of DSLs. How successful will DSLs be or not be? Do you have any tips or lessons learned?
For more on the topic of DSLs
Tech Talk: Jack Greenfield on software factories and DSLs 3/15/06
Himalia DSL targets interface builders 12/18/06
Why MS thinks MDA and UML are too general 3/28/06
Interview with “Domain-Driven Design” author Jimmy Nilsson 9/11/06
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