Hello everyone,
In January I'll be giving a brief talk to the local (Genoa, Italy)
Java User Group, about DSLs in Lisp and their integration with Java.
ABCL is of course involved, however my question is not about ABCL
itself, but about the general topic of Lisp DSLs which can be of some
interest for Java developers. Do you have, off the top of your head,
any example of a DSL which is simple, yet has at least some practical
value?
I was thinking about a simple declarative GUI language, or of
reimplementing in Lisp (a subset of) some preexisting XML-based Java
DSL (e.g. Spring's application context XML configuration), but I fear
those would not need much macrology - and the more 'magic' macrology I
manage to show off, the better :)
Thanks for any suggestions!
Cheers
Alessio Stalla
On Mon, 20 Oct 2008 14:20:11 -0700, Alessio Stalla wrote:
> In January I'll be giving a brief talk to the local (Genoa, Italy) Java
> User Group, about DSLs in Lisp and their integration with Java. ABCL is
> of course involved, however my question is not about ABCL itself, but
> about the general topic of Lisp DSLs which can be of some interest for
> Java developers. Do you have, off the top of your head, any example of a
> DSL which is simple, yet has at least some practical value?
How about SXML? Or is that already too simplistic?
regards,
Marek
From: Andrea Taverna (Tavs)
Subject: Re: Opinions about Lisp, DSLs, and Java
Date:
Message-ID: <gdpppo$r9g$1@aioe.org>
I always thought about the opportunity to use a DSL in place of Spring XML.
I wouldn't be worried about the amount of macros it would require, the
huge advantages of Lisp, compared to plain XML, are IMO the interactive
and incremental development, the opportunity to compile the code and use
Java classes when needed and its expressiveness. In short, XML is not a
PL, Lisp is.
As for the GUI, take a look at XUL. I don't know about a XUL api for CL,
but it shouldn't be hard to put together a small proof-of-concept
application.
Buona fortuna.
Andrea
Alessio Stalla wrote:
> Do you have, off the top of your head,
> any example of a DSL which is simple, yet has at least some practical
> value?
A nice example is
http://gigamonkeys.com/book/practical-parsing-binary-files.html
It solves a real problem many people already encountered themselves, the
implementation in lisp isn't that hard to understand and there is no
obvious way to implement the same thing in Java.
A disadvantage of that example is that Java does serialization already
(but in a different way) and that might cause some confusion and/or make
some listeners argue against DSLs.
HTH,
Patrick