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by antirez 5586 days ago
How Redis is a DSL? The basic 'verbs' and the command structure is taken from the Tcl language. See lrange, append, set, and many others. But it's not a full featured language of course, just a domain specific one for manipulating ADTs. But why is this DSL thing so important for Redis? If you look at the internals you'll discover Redis is in many ways an interpreter. So I think this is really important to stress to understand what Redis really is.

In the Redis manifesto there is no place where I claim we support all the kind of ADTs. We just have random access arrays, lists, sorted sets (trees), and dictionaries.

There was no marketing intention in the Redis manifesto.

1 comments

Is Apache a DSL?

I agree that the manifesto doesn't explicitly claim to support all kinds of ADTs. It just wasn't clear.

Manifesto without a marketing intention... interesting :)

I think that one of the biggest reasons antirez had for writing the manifesto was not for marketing, but so that he had a place to point people to who try to make Redis something that it's not. Feature requests/patches that don't fit the philosophy can be more easily rejected because there is a clear document spelling out what the goals of Redis are.
Much like the Zen of Python.