[pro] Lisp and DSLs

[Marco Antoniotti]

+1

May I also say that there are entire scientific, financial, and accounting communities that should be barred from using Excel?

Cheers
--
MA



On Jul 22, 2011, at 09:14 , Daniel Pezely wrote:

>  ...

> Lessons learned:  (a few more while I'm here)
> 
>  1. Know your audience, and build for the correct users.
> 
>  2. Build the right tool.  (I'm a systems programmer; a good stats person would likely have come up with a better work-flow, likely using R so rich reports could also be generated quickly.)
> 
>  3. Good language design can be challenging.  I would have been better off (perhaps) stealing SQL or XQuery's FLOWR conventions than inventing my own "simple" set of commands.  (Syntax is another matter... as you know.)
> 
>  4. Being adept at backquotes, comma substitution and unrolling lists is not necessarily enough skill to create a good, clean DSL implementation.  But keep trying.  Do your best to make one for "keeps".  Then throw it away, anyway.  It's important to not hold anything back in the first version.  Ah, experience!  (I'll likely go at this one again just for the fun of it.)  
> e.g., unrelated project from years ago: http://play.org/learning-lisp/html.lisp
> 
>  5. Collaborate: Get input from others.  My co-workers who also use Common Lisp were many time-zones and an ocean away, busy with looming deadlines of their own. However, their 10 years CL experience to my 5 (and their far deeper stats familiarity) would certainly have helped here.
> 
> -Daniel

--
Marco Antoniotti, Associate Professor				tel.	+39 - 02 64 48 79 01
DISCo, Università Milano Bicocca U14 2043		http://bimib.disco.unimib.it
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