Just A Summary : Domain Specific Pidgin

Comment on Domain Specific Pidgin by Ben

Wed, 08 Aug 2007 11:48:07 -0500

Interesting – I’ve been calling these (AR, RSpec, etc.) domain specific dialects for a while now. I think dialect might be a better term, given that the main distinguishing characteristic is the vocabulary, not the grammar (pidgins, as I recall, generally don’t take the grammar of one parent – they usually follow an extremely simplified grammar that is remarkably consistent regardless of the parent languages (which is often used as an argument for Universal Grammar, fwiw)).

Comment on Domain Specific Pidgin by Piers Cawley

Wed, 08 Aug 2007 12:25:42 -0500

We’re fast approaching “How many angels…?” territory here, but I’d be inclined to call ActiveRecord’s family of class methods taking hash arguments with meaningful keys a dialect, but reckon that RSpec is fast approaching a ‘real’ language or pidgin.

Comment on Domain Specific Pidgin by chromatic

Wed, 08 Aug 2007 14:47:12 -0500

“Dialect” reads better to me, but “pidgin” is catchy too.

Comment on Domain Specific Pidgin by Aristotle Pagaltzis

Wed, 08 Aug 2007 18:43:50 -0500

I think Parse::RecDescent qualifies as an actual DSL – external one even. After all, it actually parses grammars itself. Granted, part of the grammar is code that’s passed thru straight to Perl, but you can write a perfectly useful P::RD grammar without any Perl in it.

To stay in your image, it’s more like the speech of a second-generation immigrant who can speak the native tongues of both his parents and the locals – like me and the other Greek kids I knew while growing up in Germany. When in an audience that understands both languages, such speakers will tend to seamlessly flip-flop from one language to the other in mid-sentence depending on what rolls off the tongue easier in the moment.

(And I know this is not limited to my crowd. The same tendency is apparent in second-gen’ers with all combinations of language; whether emigrating from Greece, Italy or Turkey to Germany, or from Greece to Germany, the US/Australia/Canada or France, or from Mexico to the US, it is always true. The immigrants’ kids know both languages almost equally well and switch between them casually in mid-sentence.)

Comment on Domain Specific Pidgin by Piers Cawley

Thu, 09 Aug 2007 01:11:01 -0500

Aristotle: You are, of course, correct. My memory was playing me false and Parse::RecDescent does indeed involve a parser. In my memory it was one more of those Conway modules which feel like another language but still parsed as Perl.

Comment on Domain Specific Pidgin by David Romano

Thu, 16 Aug 2007 00:12:03 -0500

Piers: Do you think your pidgin might just actually be a register? (I know, “register” isn’t as catchy as “pidgin” :-) It seems that most DSLs use vocabulary that simply expands the native language’s patterns of expression. This is no different than inventing mathematical jargon in English to express the problem domain of mathematics. How different is your embedded little language’s syntax/grammar from Ruby’s?

Aristotle: Your description of flip-flopping back and forth between two languages mid-sentence is termed code switching in linguistics. As you said, it’s a very common phenomenon, but it is not restricted to those who speak both languages fluently.

Comment on Domain Specific Pidgin by Piers Cawley

Thu, 16 Aug 2007 01:27:42 -0500

Do you think your pidgin might actually be a register?

I don’t think so, mostly because it’s pretty much entirely declarative. It’s for attribute declaration and (currently) looks something like:

class Whatever
  attributes {
    foo.default = 42
    bar.should.match /.../
    baz.should.ensure {|val| val > foo}
    quux {
      default = 90
      should.ensure {|val| (val % 10).zero?
    }
  }
end

The implementation leans heavily on evaluating the blocks involved in odd scopes and the semantics aren’t generally what you’d consider to be the usual ones for Ruby. For instance, the line foo.default = 42 has the effect of generating code along the lines of

def foo
  @foo = 42 if instance_variable_defined? :@foo
  return @foo
end

which isn’t really the normal semantics you’d expect for assignment. Meanwhile the block in baz.should.ensure {|val| val > foo} gets evaluated in the context of an instance of the class before any assignment is made to baz via the accessor method.

I’m not entirely sure pidgin is a particularly good word either; I’m just not sure I can think of a better one.

Comment on Domain Specific Pidgin by David Romano

Thu, 16 Aug 2007 04:09:40 -0500

Thanks for showing me what it looks like and means. Now that I see it, it’s definitely not a register.

I’m not entirely sure pidgin is a particularly good word either; I’m just not sure I can think of a better one.

Me neither. :-/

Comment on Domain Specific Pidgin by Warner Onstine

Wed, 13 Feb 2008 14:05:45 -0600

I’m not sure that pidgin is the right term here, specifically from a linguistic point of view. While Pidgin languages do come about because of one or more groups of people coming together and having to communicate with each other they are indeed “languages” in their own right. More specifically these languages evolve over time into their own full-blown language, where the words being used no longer mean what they did in either language.

There was a really good story I either read or heard on Pidgin Languages (it might have come from the book “The Language Instinct” by Pinker – very good book).

I’m going to be sticking with Internal DSLs for my own reference as I’m not very comfortable with labeling these as “Pidgin Languages” in my eyes they aren’t really. Just my .02.