[lolinder]

My point isn't that the big languages can do everything that a little language could theoretically do, it's that the little languages won't have the resources to pull them off, nor will they have the resources to even do what the big languages do.

Proper debugging, syntax highlighting, language servers, security audits. These are things that engineers in the real world expect a language to have, and each little language would have to reinvent each of them. In contrast, a library can piggyback off of the tooling provided in the host language.

So even if a language can deliver on the performance and static analysis that it promises (which few will), it cannot reach adoption because it cannot provide the infrastructure needed.

(That doesn't need even get into the onboarding concerns that I and others have raised about having a codebase that is strung together from a dozen tiny languages.)

[williamcotton]

Proper debugging, syntax highlighting, language servers, security audits. These are things that engineers in the real world expect a language to have, and each little language would have to reinvent each of them.

I don’t always see this as the case and this might be a very fruitful area for research. What I mean is, much like how we have tools like bison, antlr, and the k framework, I could easily see this notion extending to language servers, etc.

As for onboarding, well, who are we onboarding? New software engineers working on a general purpose language or new operations members working on a DSL?

I remember a time when CSS and HTML had yet to be consumed by a general purpose language and the onboarding for new web designers was significantly easier.

[lolinder]

> I don’t always see this as the case and this might be a very fruitful area for research. What I mean is, much like how we have tools like bison, antlr, and the k framework, I could easily see this notion extending to language servers, etc.

Yeah, I could see this happening, to a point. I'm not convinced it will happen, because what would be the impetus?

> I remember a time when CSS and HTML had yet to be consumed by a general purpose language and the onboarding for new web designers was significantly easier.

So do I. I had a friend whose dad wanted to start building web pages for a living, right at the moment when that job was starting to vanish.

At least two factors were involved in that shift:

1. More and more companies wanted web applications, not simple web sites. A functional web app requires engineering effort or it falls apart, whereas a simple web site just requires making things look right. Once these companies had engineers for a web app, it was simpler just to pay them to build out a marketing page than to hire that out (even if hiring it out would have been cheaper).

2. WordPress was becoming more and more approachable, and others like SquareSpace stepped in to make it even easier for a non-technical person to build a website. Companies that didn't need engineers for an app realized that they could do a good enough job for their needs by just using these tools in-house.

I suspect this is the fate of any little language that successfully eliminates the need for engineers: if we can take a piece of a domain and describe it in a DSL that is streamlined enough for no-effort onboarding, it won't take very long for the DSL to be made redundant by GUI tools that are even easier to use.

At that point, the DSL either goes away entirely or it morphs into something bigger to meet more complex needs (as HTML/CSS/JS did).

(This doesn't apply to DSLs like Regex and SQL that are designed for use by engineers, but then we're back to the question of whether an external DSL is pulling its weight relative to an equivalent library.)

[williamcotton]

> what would be the impetus?

That there are many issues with general purpose programming languages such as those outlined by the author in the article?

> I suspect this is the fate of any little language that successfully eliminates the need for engineers: if we can take a piece of a domain and describe it in a DSL that is streamlined enough for no-effort onboarding, it won't take very long for the DSL to be made redundant by GUI tools that are even easier to use.

That seems ideal! Domain-specific languages have always benefited from GUI tooling alongside anything that is less clunky as textual representation.

[origin_path]

It is a fruitful area for research! Truffle is an example of the sort of framework you mean. Implement a parser+interpreter using Truffle and you get JIT compilation, GC, debugging, profiling and more stuff for free on top of the JVM.

[williamcotton]

Thank you for introducing me to Truffle! Off to write some DSLs I go!