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Comment by breck | Hacker News Reader

I make them all the time (https://jtree.treenotation.org/designer/), and track many thousands of DSLs.

IMO, the problem is our languages are unnecessarily complicated. they are all linearly parsed BNFs, and you don't need any of that. I think things will start changing big time.

That being said, my favorite ecosystem in the traditional DSL world is ANTLR, and I'd highly recommend Terence Parr's books on the field if you are interested.

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ANTLR 3.x was a game changer for me. I was able to refine my grammars so that the resulting parse tree and abstract syntax trees were the same thing. No goofy inlined tree construction pragmas, term rewriting, post parse tree walk processing.

I'm just a grammar mechanic, so I don't really grok the underlying theory or use the right word for this stuff.

I was late to the party and didn't start until ANTLR4 https://pragprog.com/titles/tpantlr2/the-definitive-antlr-4-...

Does his book actually teach you how to create a DSL using ANTLR and not just and overview? Btw the 2 books of his are almost a decade old, so are they any good now?

Yes, it walks your through it step by step. I have https://pragprog.com/titles/tpantlr2/the-definitive-antlr-4-... and at least 1 more of his, forget where it is. I would say it is ageless (at least, until something better than ANTLR comes along—ohm is promising but not sure what the latest is with that).

"The Definitive ANTLR 4 Reference" is absolutely the most understated title I've ever seen in a book. It's really more like "The Book That Will Change How you Look at Programming Languages Forever"

IMO anyway. I guess it depends on how much you've been exposed to parsers and grammars and compiler compilers already.

Thanks, I'll start reading his book, already have some experience with interpreters and compilers :)

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