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Comment by groby_b | Hacker News Reader

I'm not sure DSLs qualify as "the English-Likeness monster". A good DSL isn't about being like english, it's about being concise and expressive in the given domain.

A good DSL has no need to "look like English".

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People often think of DSLs as a way of making a concise, expressive view of the domain look like English. See, for example, RSpec.

(I guess what I'm really saying is that you're right, but you're saying something else, raganwald is right too.)

I'm having a variant of the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon where I start seeing something everywhere after writing about it (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5056667).

I personally like how cucumber tests look exactly like english but it's up to the test writer to explain (through the writing of "step definitions") what each type of phase means (in actual ruby) and then when you combine them you can perform any number of _domain-specific_ tasks. Kinda neat. and a halfway between actually writing a DSL and explaining to the ruby runtime how to interpret a subset of english for this domain.

thank you! I knew there had to be a name for this...

I don't think raganwald is right here, or rather he's only right about a subset of DSLs -- the subset of DSLs which attempt to map a specific domain to english. I think most good DSLs eschew mapping domains to english in favour of mapping those domains to some new language designed to express information about that domain.

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