About the Book
Every time you design a domain model on your whiteboard, it seems to get lost in translation within the complex code base you started with. When you design your implementation model in your favorite programming language, it no longer speaks the dialect that the domain expert can understand. If your implementation on the whiteboard doesn’t conform exactly to the specifications you agreed on with the domain user, there’s no way it can be verified by the person who understands the domain rules.
DSLs in Action addresses this core issue by suggesting a DSL-driven application development model. Design your domain APIs around the syntax and semantics that the domain user understands. Then, even during the development of the code base, the user can do incremental verifications of the domain rule implementations. If your code speaks the language of the domain, it becomes clearer to the person who develops it, to the one who maintains it, and to a nonprogrammer domain expert who understands the business.
This book addresses the issues of using a DSL as well as implementing one. It talks about a DSL as a thin veneer of linguistic abstraction on top of an underlying semantic model. The semantic model is the implementation that manages the core structure of the domain, while the language layer speaks the dialect of the domain user.