[prospero]

All of your examples are gestalts. They're not single seamless abstractions, they're patchworks that are more than the sum of their parts.

That's precisely what is being proposed here: a platform for creating a development environment that is more than the sum of its parts. Something that gives you composable pieces that can be fit together into something that maps directly onto your problem space.

Is this really so unclear? I can't picture the hypothetical product that you're arguing against.

[its_so_on]

Well, I looked at the "gestalt" Wikipedia article. As near as I can make out, you're saying that Google in fact highly tailors its search-for-geneticists, which has nothing to do with its search-for-bakers: it seems like a single whole, but isn't. But that patently isn't so. Patently, every niche runs off the same algorithms. Equally, bankers' circle of friends use the same facebook that teenagers' circle of friends use: it isn't multitudinous facebooks that seem to be one but are really quite different. Likewise jeans in jeans-and-a-blazer are obviously the same jeans as jeans in jeans-and-a-tshirt. iPad apps are built with the very same SDK and frequently have very similar UI/UX. There is literally nothing domain-specific about objective c. I will grant you that Amazon's cloud stuff is very different from its merchandizing operations, but beyond that I don't see where the big difference between shipping books and shipping dry cereal is, which is two businesses that Amazon is now in. In fact, if anything, Amazon's cloud services are the OPPOSITE of domain-specific: Reddit, which includes ZERO filesharing, is on it, and so is Dropbox, which is basically ONLY filesharing. If you look at what Amazon is actually exposing with AWS, you will see it is as generic and non-domain-specific as theoretically possible. Heck, they've even abstracted away the individual server! (So the last bastion of something that might separate a database-heavy user site from a disk-heavy backup site disappears). I would say that their whole movement is towards being non-specific.

You probably understand what you're saying better than I do, so please do explain. Because from where I'm standing, it seems the whole march of the Internet is in busting domain-specific-languages and approaches. Every time a cute hack with CSS hits the front page, it's proof that CSS derives its power precisely from not being a domain specific language. Off-hand, can you name a single domain-specific language or approach that has really 'won'?

You may know more about this than I do, so it is certainly a genuine question.

[prospero]

Let's talk about Google, then. In addition to having special ways of displaying results for different types of searches (local, geo, weather, shopping, etc.), there are also a lot of different heuristics underlying the search results. It's not just PageRank-and-done, it's many different approaches trying to maintain a uniform level of quality across a variety of niches.

I'll repeat that again: it's not the approach that's homogeneous, it's the quality.

You can see this with Apple, too. Their devices aren't limited to some set number of use-cases, it provides an API and ecosystem for creating new, domain-specific applications. You mention Objective-C in your response, which is kind of missing the point; we're talking about domain-specific applications, not domain-specific languages. LightTable will presumably be very consistent and general at the API level, and uses Clojure, which is a general-purpose language as well.

As for Amazon, their offerings span the entire spectrum from general to domain-specific. You can get an empty VM, but you can also get something like Elastic MapReduce. Amazon will happily develop domain-specific products on top of their platform as long as there's a large enough market.

Finally, look at Rails, which is a framework specifically for creating web apps. It doesn't help me write a new NoSQL server, it doesn't help me write a new AAA video game, it seems to be doing okay all the same. It's used because it's a really effective lever in certain, specific cases. If we can have a development environment which is a similarly large lever across a wide range of cases, how could that ever be a bad thing?

[phyzome]

You're saying that CSS isn't domain-specific?

[its_so_on]

The more and more you can do with it, clearly it's becoming less and less domain-specific.

http://www.cssplay.co.uk/menu/amazing.html

or just google for hackernews posts like entirely in css, pure css, all in css, etc. Hell from a quick glance it seems that if you google for 'in css' half the posts on hackernews are like that...

http://y.ww.com/item?id=2636440

It's not hard to see where this is going...