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by celeritascelery 2338 days ago
> My assertion is that, while that's nice, most of the DSL is actually the functions and data structures. The syntax is sugar - say, maybe 10% of the benefit, but not more.

I don’t know, thinking of some DSL’s like HTML or SQL, syntax seems to be a really big part it.

1 comments

It isn't immediately obvious that it is, to me. Could you expand on that?

For example, what works for html is basically the dom (data structure) and its functionality (the functions). There are others ways of creating and working with those than the specific html syntax. For example, haml. Or you might say, jsx, or elm,is also such a syntax for the same data structures.

These other approaches work perfectly fine, too.

Touché. I understand better what your saying. But even though the syntax changes, we always have some specialized syntax for using it. But it does make it seem like the data is more important since that is what stays the same.