foreword
DSLs seem like a very well-kept secret because of our failures as a community to explain them in simple words. Personally, it took getting a PhD and working many years in the field to understand what can be achieved with a DSL, and it was not very tempting for others to follow. Meinte draws another path with this book. He presents the clearness of thought you would expect from a mathematician, but he spares us the complications. We, as a community, needed a pragmatic mathematician to show us the way.
I always admired the elegance of Meinte’s thoughts when he was sharing his experience on projects like ALEF (a DSL built for the Dutch Tax and Custom Agency), or his experience designing Más, his own Language Workbench, or what he learned at Mendix, a company later acquired by Siemens. Naturally, when I learned he was working on this book, I took the opportunity to interview him, to learn more about it. Since then, I have been waiting patiently for this book to be in your hands.
So, what can you expect to get from this book?
The book throws away the historical baggage of building DSLs and traditional approaches, which are better suited to create heavy IDEs. Meinte instead adapts those ideas to a world where lightweight solutions running in the browser are the norm.