Domain-Specific Development with Visual Studio DSL Tools

Foreword

Ludwig Wittgenstein once compared a language to a city. In the historic center were gnarly lanes, in the middle were broad avenues and gardens with diverse architecture, and on the edges were geometrically planned suburbs. He was, of course, speaking of what we now call “natural” languages, but the analogy holds to our computer languages as well. We have low-level languages that fit the historic centers. And the boxy modeling techniques we use are the Stalinist apartment blocks in the suburbs.

It’s the broad avenues and diverse architecture in between that have evaded the conventions of most of our computer languages. If you look at the workings of the city, there are street layouts, traffic patterns, zoning maps, architectural codes, ...