Thank you for sharing your experience. Do you use a more or less well-known toolset like MPS or Xtext or it is some kind of a custom framework? Any lessons learned and best practices regarding external DSL design and development?
We built everything ourselves. The parser in particular was written in-house by a Person Who No Longer Works Here who was a parser enthusiast (Conway’s law). If we were starting from scratch today I would think we would use an off the shelf package. One excellent choice was to make the language [0] an open standard and now there is at least one totally novel implementation [1] in addition to ours [2].
I appreciate your clarifications. Until now, I was aware of [0], but not [1] and [2]. Your implementation seems be much more popular than both the new alternative and a reference implementation. The (general and scientific) workflow engines universe is very large - it likely contains, at least, dozens of production-level implementations. Such diversity is both a blessing and a curse, though ...