Internal DSLs

Speaker: Matt Follett

When: 6:30 PM Wednesday 05/19/10

Where:

Announce Media

6665 Delmar Boulevard

Saint Louis, MO 63130-4544

Abstract:

Software development becomes increasingly complex year after year. Developers are constantly required to provide new solutions to more complex problems often with more domain specific knowledge. A popular approach to this has been to implement Domain Specific Languages (DSLs) to detach the logic required to understand the problem's domain from the programming. However, writing a full-blown DSL takes time.

An approach that has been gaining popularity year after year has been implementing internal DSLs. Internal DSLs are extensions of the host language that are still constrained by it's specifications. However, by using an internal DSL the developer can more quickly provide a many of the features of a full blown DSL while avoiding much of the work. This talk will discuss the usage, benefits, and implementation of internal DSLs. It will attempt to explain the concepts through a selection of examples.

About Matt Follett:

Matt Follett is a developer in the Informatics team at The Genome Center at Washington University School of Medicine, where he works on high-throughput DNA sequencing projects. He is a graduate of the University of Missouri at Rolla, where he majored in Computer Science & Computer Engineering. He has worked for Monsanto, Boeing, and Beck Automation as a software engineer. He was the head of the 2009 St. Louis BarCamp. He currently resides in St. Louis, where he heads the local chapter of Perl Mongers.