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Aug 26Classic WTF: A Dumbain Specific Language
by in Best of… on 2026-09-07It's a holiday here in the US, a celebration of labor, so we're reaching back through the archives for a story about an attempt to be labor saving that was not successful. Original. --Remy
I’ve had to write a few domain-specific-languages in the past. As per Remy’s Law of Requirements Gathering, it’s been mostly because the users needed an Excel-like formula language. The danger of DSLs, of course, is that they’re often YAGNI in the extreme, or at least a sign that you don’t really understand your problem.
XML, coupled with schemas, is a tool for building data-focused DSLs. If you have some complex structure, you can convert each of its features into an XML attribute. For example, if you had a grammar that looked something like this: