Why most of us won't be inventing little languages

• skrape.it

  4 752 6.4 Kotlin

  A Kotlin-based testing/scraping/parsing library providing the ability to analyze and extract data from HTML (server & client-side rendered). It places particular emphasis on ease of use and a high level of readability by providing an intuitive DSL. It aims to be a testing lib, but can also be used to scrape websites in a convenient fashion.

This includes many things that Kotlin makes use of, like String.invoke(block: () -> Unit) which is both an extension on String instances and makes uses of Kotlin's "ability" to move lambdas out of parentheses if they are the last argument (so something like log(lazyString: () -> String), can be used as log({ "message" }), or log { "message" }, @DslMarker (to allow a String.invoke(() -> Unit) block in the form of "it should behave well", only inside the context of a StringSpec.), infix funs (+ is infix operator fun plus(), with some slightly specific language handling because it's extremely common, infix fun shouldBe). This is using Kotest (https://kotest.io/docs/framework/writing-tests.html), but other tools like Ktor, Skrape.it (https://github.com/skrapeit/skrape.it), and more: https://kotlinlang.org/docs/type-safe-builders.html

• wasp

  192 11,627 9.7 TypeScript

  The fastest way to develop full-stack web apps with React & Node.js.

  

This is how we went with https://wasp-lang.dev/ (a DSL for building full-stack web apps). It is a very declarative language (config pretty much) and there is still plenty of work around tooling, but also enabled to cut down on a lot of boilerplate.

Another route to consider when implementing a DSL, is to make an embedded one (e.g. like Terraform or Pulumi have, even both at the same time). That doesn't resolve all the tooling problems since there is still a compile step, but might provide a more integrated experience, although at the cost of brevity.

• InfluxDB

  www.influxdata.com sponsored

  Power Real-Time Data Analytics at Scale. Get real-time insights from all types of time series data with InfluxDB. Ingest, query, and analyze billions of data points in real-time with unbounded cardinality.

  

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