[vinceguidry]

I should someday make a screencast showing how I use DSLs in my projects. I've done the "couple dozen functions" thing enough times to know it only goes so far, whenever I find myself reaching for a DSL, I'd wished I'd done it sooner.

DSLs should be looked at as syntactic sugar for object instantiation. Language methods should set the object's state or run an instance method. Object behavior goes in the object's class.

I'm looking at one of my DSLs, it's a module with a parse method that takes a file with a default argument to the common "XXXXfile" that I see used a lot for DSLs. It opens the file and module_eval's the code. I use instance and module variables to hold state in the execution context of the DSL.

If you stick to this pattern you'll find a DSL easy to manage. I use it as a replacement for instantiating objects with YAML files, which I find brittle. I hate maintaining those, but a DSL will give me just the right amount of indirection. I can express the objects exactly how I want them to be expressed, which is a big win for me.