DSL Hell

Everyone remembers DLL hell. You know -- run my app but there's 15 versions/copies of a DLL. So which one do I choose.  That was hell.

 

Guess what? I hate to tell you, but we are in DSL hell. There's XML dialects all over the place. Those are DSLs (for Mrs. Pinky, that's domain specific languages). And so we have lots of developers having to learn different XML dialects just to work with different runtimes.

 

And, APIs themselves are really just DSLs. You have to know which objects to instantiate, which methods to call, and in what order.

 

So - we're in DSL hell. And it's an ugly hell. Who likes writing code in XML? (besides Don Box)

 

Oslo, and M, are about to change the game. We want developers to build and use natural, textual languages. Imagine users configuring and running applications by writing simple text in a simple language targeted at their domain. Imagine writing a WCF service in 10s lines of code instead of 100s lines of C# + 20 lines of config + ... Imagine a standard language for business processes, such as Purchase Order Processing. Imagine imagine imagine...

One more thing. As a developer, I am pretty sure you will have more fun writing a DSL with Oslo than most programming you do today. I haven't had this much fun in years!

So this is Oslo. Check it out: http://msdn.microsoft.com/oslo