Rocky makes some good points in his recent piece on DSLs (DSLs — fun, cool, but maybe a bad idea? ) — basically, who’s going to learn the DSL when the folks that know it move on? That’s one potential downside of the proliferation of DSLs and I could give you more.

However, all technologies come with these downsides, e.g.

• Managed environments make new programmers forget what’s under the hood (and in some cases, actually afraid to look).
• Horseless carriages produce pollution.
• iPhones are killing the English language by encouraging the use of “words” like “lol,” “afaik” and “wtf.”
• Airplanes crash.
• Very very bad code written in Visual Basic can still do the right thing.
• Fonts let every letter look like a ransom note.
• etc.

The point isn’t whether a technology has downsides or not — of course, it does. The point is whether the upsides outweigh the downsides. In the case of DSLs and model-driven development all up, the “Oslo” team is making a big bet that we can make you overall more productive when digging ourselves out of the IT software backlog hole. Will we be? I think so, but we have a lot of work to do before we’ll know for sure.

And how do we reduce the impact of the downsides of a new technology? By knowing that they’re there, which is why Rocky’s commentary is so useful. Recommended.

nearly 40 years old; past his youth!
But tonight with a smile,
he swam non-stop for a mile.
First time in his life - that’s the truth!

I swam a mile when I was 17 and again last summer, but never non-stop before. I know it doesn’t compare to real swimmers (it took me 45 minutes), but I’ve been swimming for less than a year. Plus i found two meaningful rhymes for “Duluth.“ I rock. : )

Episode 123 of Software Engineering Radio is all about Oslo:

“In this episode we discuss Microsoft’s OSLO platform with Doug Purdy and Don Box. We briefly discuss what OSLO is in general and then look at the various components of OSLO. We also look at how OSLO fits in with the general Microsoft strategy and how it compares to other DSL/Model-driven approaches. We then look at language modularization and composition and discuss the similarities with XML and Smalltalk. Finally, we discuss possible integrations of OSLO with other MD* approaches and technologies.”

Enjoy.

There’s been such a flood of DSL DevCon talk proposals that I’ve had a hard time keeping up (although feel free to let those nice folks in Eclipse, XML, Java and Unix land if you know who they are!).

Also, there’s been a huge amount of interest in attending the conference itself and some folks even worry that the conference will sell out before they can register (the first five DevCons have all sold out and those cost money!), so they’ve been asking me to put ’em on a list. I’m still working out the logistics with the nice Lang.NET folks, but if you’d like to pre-register for the DSL DevCon, drop me a line and I’ll put you on the list. It will be my job to make sure that anyone that pre-registers gets to go.

Tell a friend!

Lars Corneliussen has a fun post entitled Microsoft “Oslo” MGraph - the next XML? He concludes by comparing JSON, XML and MGraph to represent the same data:

• JSON: 661 characters
• XML: 1065 characters
• MGraph: 590 characters

Enjoy.

I’m giving two talks on model-driven development at VSone in Germany in Feb this year: the keynote and a dive into Oslo. If you’re in the neighborhood or are looking for a party spot, drop on by!

I’m even going for an extra few days to see the sights — hopefully it won’t be too cold. I’m from the Midwest and all, but when it’s cold there, we stay home. I want to go out! Any suggestions for what I should oughta see?