DSLs: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly Charles Consel INRIA / University of Bordeaux

Background Designed and implemented DSLs in a variety of areas, including – Stream processing – Device drivers – Programmable routers – Coordination of networked entities – Telephony service creation Co-founder of the INRIA-spinoff Siderion Technologies Worked on methodologies towards developing DSLs and assessing their practicality.

The Good DSL can dramatically shorten the path between a specification and an implementation DSL enables domain-specific verifications DSL hides the combination of complex technologies – As a scripting language – As a disappearing language

The Bad and The Ugly Lack of a systematic approach to duplicating DSL successes Lack of tools for domain analysis and language design Lack of a global view, beyond a DSL – PL not used to have customers – DSL not integrated into a domain process, tool, … – No user study of DSLs