Domain Specific Languages

Ray Myers has started his Year of Domain Specific Languages 🎉

I listened to the first episode yesterday, on my bike because I’m getting fit again, and was reminded of when I did something similar. Got me wondering if this is a DSL? 🤔

Around 2007 I set up a CI/CD system for Pershing, using Microsoft Team Foundation Server, PowerShell, and MSI.

I’m writing this to help remember the details, probably needs a diagram, however the main principles:

• developers stored component build details in XML (mainly build path and build dependencies)
• testers stored environment details in XML (mainly environment name, server details, and components per server)
• build engineers maintained an XLST that would merge and transform the XML into PowerShell commands which either incrementally updated an environment by installing the changed components (using MSI) or cleaned the environment and installed everything afresh.

With that I’m pretty sure Ansible and Terraform can be classified as Domain Specific Languages - one to check - and it feels like a direction worth taking with GenAI. Not least as Ray mentioned something I hadn’t thought about, DSLs can be visual. 🤓

Anyway, looking forward to following Ray’s journey and exploring this area in greater detail, it feels relevant to consistency in response from LLMs. There’s a lot of unknowns for me. So it’s an interesting looking mountain to climb ⛰️ 😄