Blog: dsl
My thoughts on software development.
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I have many interests in software development and I enjoy writing about then. As such my blog doesn't cover just one topic.
In the [previous article](/blog/write-dsls-and-code-faster/) I wrote about Domain Specific Languages (DSLs) and how useful they are, but I didn't get into the details of parsing them, that's where this article comes in.
Previously we made this DSL:
```javascript
User.ScheduleAppointment has {
a UserId userId
an AppointmentDatetime appointmentDatetime
a Location location from {
a LocationName locationName from location
a Latitude latitude
a Longitude longitude
}
}
```
We want to take the above, and parse it. That means turning the text into an Abstract Syntax Tree (AST). An AST is a tree structure that's easy ...
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# What is a DSL
DSL stands for Domain Specific language, this means that it is a language that is designed to solve a specific problem in a domain.
DSLs are great if you want to write a generic solution to a specific problem without all the boilerplate code.
A good DSL is easy to write and understand. Once someone understands the domain language, they can read the DSL, and understand the problem, even if they're not a coder.
DSLs allow us to automate many things, including aspects of development, greatly increasing our speed and lowering codes and error rates.
# Here's one I made earlier
At work, I was getting annoyed with how it a...
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