

Metalinguistic Abstractions in Ruby - raganwald
http://github.com/raganwald/homoiconic/blob/master/2009-10-08/metalinguistic.md#readme

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jamesbritt
Reg, thanks very much for this. I haven't read the whole thing (I have to get
some work done first), but serious consideration of what is or isn't a DSL is
always welcome.

Much of what I see aren't DSLs; they are more domain-specific dialects or,
really, APIs.

The trouble is that people have different critical judgment when they view
something as an API or as a DSL, with the notion of a DSL allowing less well-
considered APIs to slip though.

"This discussion is extracted from a forthcoming talk--"The Revised, Revised
Ruby.rewrite(Ruby)" or "R5"--to be be delivered at Stack Overflow Dev Days."

Will this be recorded?

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raganwald
I don't know whether the talks will be recorded. It's being organized by
Carsonified:

<http://stackoverflow.carsonified.com/events/toronto/>

I get the last spot, the one everyone skips to get an early start on their
BEveERages.

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10ren
I like your _abstractioneering_ section about slides (though not the title).
Makes absolute sense: if your program is intended to communicate something to
somebody, think of it in terms of something else you use for communication. I
find I have to wait til I'd written a fair bit of a project before I can
divide it up into modules _correctly_ \--- you need to understand a problem
really well before know what the sections need to be. I guess in "giving a
presentation" that you already understand the project and have finished it is
implicit.

But maybe your metaphor will help even in the process. I'll try it. :-)

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raganwald
When developing a presentation I often re-organize it as I understand it
better and get a fix on how I want to communicate the subject. Would software
be any different?

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kscaldef
You spend a lot of time talking about semantics and levels of abstraction, but
there's no mention at all of syntax. I find it difficult to consider something
a "language" when the syntactic rules are completely decoupled from the
abstractions that it describes.

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raganwald
Hello again! Thanks for anticipating the next post that is currently in draft
form. I am extremely interested in what I call "meta-syntactic programming"
and everybody else calls "Macros circa 1969."

<http://github.com/raganwald/rewrite_rails#readme>

