> "I think DSLs are about defining a 100% textual format."

That's an unjustified qualification. I could throw together a spreadsheet format that is all text. The spreadsheet GUI then becomes a advanced text editor that, when editing that particular format, exposes advanced content-aware controls not at all unlike advanced text editors like emacs can for s-expressions.

We can bridge the gap in other ways too, for instance the '2d' racket language that lets you do control flow using a two-dimensional ascii art grid: https://docs.racket-lang.org/2d/index.html It's not hard to see how this concept could be iterated on to become something quite like a spreadsheet, and with editor support the editor/language combination would begin to look a lot like a spreadsheet too.

> I could throw together a spreadsheet format that is all text. […] The spreadsheet GUI then becomes a advanced text editor that, when editing that particular format, exposes advanced content-aware controls not at all unlike advanced text editors like emacs can for s-expressions.

Emacs already has that, included in org-mode: https://orgmode.org/org.html#Tables

(Emacs also has an even more spreadsheet-like mode; ses-mode, but that saves its data in less-than-purely-textual format. Or, at least, less textual than org-mode.)

> That's an unjustified qualification. I could throw together a spreadsheet format that is all text. The spreadsheet GUI then becomes a advanced text editor that, when editing that particular format, exposes advanced content-aware controls not at all unlike advanced text editors like emacs can for s-expressions.

If you could invent a text format that could be efficiently edited with a basic text editor then I would agree it's a DSL. But I feel like you would lose a lot by dropping a dedicated GUI, e.g.:

- horizontal scrolling of columns, adding, hiding columns

- "smart copying" a formula by scrolling down

- selection of rows/columns/cells

I don't think anybody would use such DSL using a basic editor.

Overall it's discussion about the definitions of terms, but I don't understand why people want to capture anything having some "editable format" as a "DSL" when addtional terms like "visual programming" allow more differentiation?

What about Unreal Blueprints, Dynamo BIM? Visual GUI doesn't make them less DSLish.

I think these are examples of a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_programming_language, while https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domain-specific_language#Examp... are purely text-based.

Don't confuse a deficiency of a wikipedia article for the definition of that thing.

So where should I look up the definition of a DSL?

Let's take the Wikipedia definition, not the examples list:

> A domain-specific language (DSL) is a computer language specialized to a particular application domain.

where computer language links to a list of things that includes "programming languages", which visual programming languages are a part of.

Other sections of the article also mention some graphical examples, e.g. UML. (which isn't a programming language, but a modeling language, also used sometimes as an input to software)

> I think DSLs are about defining a 100% textual format.

Spreadsheets are an argument for thinking outside of that particular box.

Spreadsheets are about thinking inside of a lot of little general boxes, instead of just one big particular box.