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by rramadass 698 days ago
Very Nice.

A rare mention of Intentional Programming aka IP (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intentional_programming) on HN. I first came to know of this from an article by Charles Simonyi titled "The Death of Computer Languages, The Birth of Intentional Programming" on MSDN. But alas, the promise never came to pass. The only other place i know of which covers it is a chapter in the book Generative Programming Methods, Tools, and Applications by Krysztof Czarnecki et al. IP is rather hard to understand (i still don't get it completely) and afaik there are no publicly available tools/IDEs to learn/play with it.

I don't believe Jetbrains MPS is a IP programming editor, it is meant for designing DSLs. IP has aspects of a DSL but is not the same.

Finally a huge upvote for mentioning Markus Voelter who is THE Expert in DSL design/implementation/usage. Checkout his articles/essays and the free ebook "Domain Engineering: Designing, Implementing and Using Domain-Specific Languages" from his above mentioned site.

2 comments

The original Intentional Programming in the mid-nineties was a much broader vision than Language Workbenches, more like a grand unified theory of software development and related tools such as IDEs, languages, compilers, and a marketplace of components in that space.

My understanding, from the demos they were giving around 15 years ago, is that the Intentional company ended up focusing on a smaller feature set similar to MPS (I don’t have personal development experience with the Intentional product, only MPS).

It would be interesting to learn more about their work and lessons learned.

Federico Tomassetti is also good. Check out his blog: https://tomassetti.me/blog/
Thank You. Seems like a expert "Language Engineer" worth learning from.