DeRailed DSL (was Re: compile-time regex redux)

[Kevin Bealer]

Walter Bright wrote:
> kris wrote:
>> Walter Bright wrote:
>>> The flashy stuff, though, is the stuff that piques peoples' interests 
>>> enough to give D a try.
>>
>> Bling is very much in the eye of the beholder, and often has the 
>> inverse effect?
> 
> If it is perceived as being *just* bling, it will have the reverse 
> effect. If you can show, however, that it solves otherwise intractable 
> or time-wasting problems, you get interest.

I agree, though I think most people have a psychological bias toward 
problems they can already solve but are tedious, as opposed to problems 
that are too hard to be done now.  (I.e. it's easier to sell dishwashers 
than personal robots, and the first home computers were marketed as 
useful for organizing recipes.)

So while DSLs are really cool, if you want to advertise in "java 
developer magazine", you want to use them in an elegant way to do the 
top five routine tasks better, rather than solving P = NP, even if the 
latter is far more interesting.  From the little that I understand RoR, 
it seems to be exactly this - for building web sites of the type that 
already exist but require a lot of grunt work to get off the ground.

Kevin