Last week, the 1st European Lisp Symposium took place in Bordeaux, France. It was a very successful event, with some excellent paper presentations, but also more interactive formats. For example, we tried out the writers' workshop format for what we called a "work-in-progress" track, which was pretty well received by the participating authors. It's a format that focuses on improving the quality of papers that are not yet ready for publication. I'm very optimistic that we will see the results of this track at future Lisp events. We also organized "birds of a feather" sessions on various topics (distributed programming, image processing, CLIM and better system definition facilities), which were also very well received by the participants. It is my hope that future Lisp events will have more of these interactive formats.
The symposium itself went very smoothly, which was primarily due to the excellent local organization by Antoine Allombert, Marie Beurton-Aimar, Irène Durand, Nicole Lun and Robert Strandh. Without their willingness to organize the event and without the energy they put into it, the symposium would have never taken place. So a big thank you to all of them!
It was our intention to organize the European Lisp Symposium as an annual event right from the start. So the preparations for next year's ELS have already started, which will take place in Milan in 2009, at around the same time of the year (ca. end of May), and will be organized by Marco Antoniotti and António Leitão. More news will follow on the usual channels, but you can already start to prepare your ideas for ELS 2009!
May 27, 2008
May 26, 2008
Fear of DSLs?
In Fear of Parsers? I responded to Martin Fowler's posting ParserFear, arguing that more often than not, building new parsers for domain-specific languages may be too complicated for the benefits you can get from using domain-specific syntax.
To be clear about this: This is not an argument against domain-specific languages in general, only against domain-specific syntax. Domain-specific languages in Lisp are straightforward to build, easy to use once you are used to Lisp (which is not that hard either), and flexible enough to be adapted to future needs, without getting into the hairy details of designing and implementing suitable domain-specific parsers.
To be clear about this: This is not an argument against domain-specific languages in general, only against domain-specific syntax. Domain-specific languages in Lisp are straightforward to build, easy to use once you are used to Lisp (which is not that hard either), and flexible enough to be adapted to future needs, without getting into the hairy details of designing and implementing suitable domain-specific parsers.
May 20, 2008
Fear of parsers?
Martin Fowler posts a lot about DSLs these days. In a recent post about ParserFear, he comments on an apparently typical reaction against creating one's own DSLs. That reaction seems to be that parsers are hard to write, and that it's easier to use XML instead because with XML, you get the parser for free. Martin Fowler then continues to explain why in his experience, parsers are not hard to implement, by contrasting a specific XML case with an alternative design using Antlr.
I think he misses the point, though. It's indeed the case that, taken by themselves, parsers are not very hard to write, especially if you stick to simple grammars. However, they could just be a too high investment for too little return.
This reminds me of a different story: A couple of years ago, Erich Gamma answered a few questions about patterns in one of his talks. One question was about which patterns he would not include anymore in the Design Patterns book. Among others, he mentioned the Singleton and the Visitor pattern, and his explanation for not including them was that he deems them too complicated.
Most people react puzzled when they hear this story. Yes, everybody who has tried to implement visitors knows that they are quite complicated, but in contrast, singletons seem extremely simple and straightforward to implement. However, the major point here is that they are too complicated for what they achieve: A singleton only guarantees that you get exactly one instance of a class, not more, not less. You might as well just introduce a global variable with that one instance and don't bother going through the minutiae of implementing the Singleton pattern correctly (which has border cases that you can get wrong after all, depending on what language you have to implement it in).
That's the major point: The effort has to be compared against the benefits you achieve. The same holds for writing parsers for DSLs. A domain-specific syntax simply doesn't buy you that much, but just creates another layer of code that needs to be maintained and can create follow-up problems, for example, when the syntax you designed happens to be too inflexible to be adapted to change requests in future versions of your code.
This is also the main reason why Lispers like s-expression. The rules for s-expressions are extremely simple, but at the same time also very flexible: The first element in a list determines the meaning of an expression, and all other elements are interpreted in terms of that first element. The same in XML: The tag determines the meaning of an expression, and everything that is nested inside it is interpreted in terms of the tag. An advantage of Lisp over XML is that you don't even need separate reading and processing steps of DOMs, since s-expressions are seamlessly embedded in the language itself.
So the main point of "parser fear" is not that parsers are hard, but just too hard for what they buy you.
I think he misses the point, though. It's indeed the case that, taken by themselves, parsers are not very hard to write, especially if you stick to simple grammars. However, they could just be a too high investment for too little return.
This reminds me of a different story: A couple of years ago, Erich Gamma answered a few questions about patterns in one of his talks. One question was about which patterns he would not include anymore in the Design Patterns book. Among others, he mentioned the Singleton and the Visitor pattern, and his explanation for not including them was that he deems them too complicated.
Most people react puzzled when they hear this story. Yes, everybody who has tried to implement visitors knows that they are quite complicated, but in contrast, singletons seem extremely simple and straightforward to implement. However, the major point here is that they are too complicated for what they achieve: A singleton only guarantees that you get exactly one instance of a class, not more, not less. You might as well just introduce a global variable with that one instance and don't bother going through the minutiae of implementing the Singleton pattern correctly (which has border cases that you can get wrong after all, depending on what language you have to implement it in).
That's the major point: The effort has to be compared against the benefits you achieve. The same holds for writing parsers for DSLs. A domain-specific syntax simply doesn't buy you that much, but just creates another layer of code that needs to be maintained and can create follow-up problems, for example, when the syntax you designed happens to be too inflexible to be adapted to change requests in future versions of your code.
This is also the main reason why Lispers like s-expression. The rules for s-expressions are extremely simple, but at the same time also very flexible: The first element in a list determines the meaning of an expression, and all other elements are interpreted in terms of that first element. The same in XML: The tag determines the meaning of an expression, and everything that is nested inside it is interpreted in terms of the tag. An advantage of Lisp over XML is that you don't even need separate reading and processing steps of DOMs, since s-expressions are seamlessly embedded in the language itself.
So the main point of "parser fear" is not that parsers are hard, but just too hard for what they buy you.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)