rubydoes.net

In my previous post I alluded to the common tendency to confuse a fluent interface with a DSL. Here are few fantastic posts that explain the differences:

Fowler’s discussion of of DSLs mentions FluentInterface as a form of DSL, but says that in some languages (LISP, smalltalk) it goes far beyond this. From Scott Bellware comes Fluent Interfaces and DSL’s and Disambiguating Fluent Interface. Jimmy Bogard succintly puts it

using extension methods, fluent interfaces, etc. [is] all a poor man’s substitute for the clearer syntax that Ruby inherently provides.

. Jimmy also reaches the same conclusion as I - once IronRuby ships there won’t be much point in trying to achieve these DSLs in C# anymore, indeed IronRuby will be a poweful tool in the .NET developer’s toolbox.

I spent Monday and Tuesday of this week at Remix07 Boston and had a great time. Like the original Mix conference, the Remix conference was mostly targeted at v-next web technologies, with a extremely heavy focus on Silverlight. When I first heard of Silverlight I was a skeptic, but the more I learn about it the more I see it will be a very compelling product.

One of the sessions I went to was Just Glue It, Ruby and the DLR in Silverlight by David Laribee. David did a great job explaining Domain Specific Languages, and showing off lots of the ALT.NET tools and practices. One thing that really gelled for me was how he explained the future proliferation of DSL’s into our industry. If you look at rails for example, there are at least 3 DSL’s jammed in there, one at each “tier”. David wanted to make the point that if we start creating lots and lots of small DSL’s to solve the multitude of problems in our domain, that our code will be cleaner, more maintainable, and more expressive.

David also showed off some Ruby, which I think many people in the room had very little experience or knowledge of. It’s hard to show how malleable Ruby is and the advantages that adds in an 1.5 hour session, but David did a good job showing some of the highlights of the language.

David did not have a chance to show off any IronRuby which was a shame, but increasing the general knowledge of the .net community serves much more purpose, at least until IronRuby is a little more baked.