Re:Problems with DSLs for non-programmers
by zwkrt on Saturday May 25, 2019 @12:08PM
(#20009753)
You can see this with how VB became much more monstrous and complex as soon as they tried to shoehorn in a multi-table paradigm.
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I think later-legacy-VB (eg 6) suffers harshly from failing to properly separate primatives.
Imho (open to disagreement), one should think incredibly hard before adding primatives to a DSL. Because what that's essentially saying is "My abstraction was incomplete over the target domain, and now I'm going to hack something in." And now you have a "domain + some other stuff" language, which starts to look like a general purpose language.
SQL vs VB is an excellent example of focus.
(Although I do think VB.net added sanity back to the mix, by saying more clearly "These are VB things" and "These are .net things", and if you want to do the latter in the former, just make a library call)