The linguist programmer
summary
The talk argues that when an application’s behavior is controlled by large, messy configuration files and many conditional code paths, a better solution is to design a domain-specific language (DSL), compiler, or virtual machine. It gives examples like SQLite, Emacs, tcpdump and Spark to show how adding a language improves configuration, performance, and extensibility, and outlines creating a language as an alternative to proliferating flags, factories and strategy patterns.
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chapters (12)
- 0:00Introduction
- 1:05What is a linguist?
- 3:30Config parameter problems
- 8:24Hackable by design
- 10:35Create a DSL step by step
- 13:50Abstract syntax trees
- 16:39Execute tree with a stack
- 19:27Prune tree from below
- 20:32Microservices example
- 29:20Statistical batch system
- 33:40Advantages of this approach
- 35:28Q&A
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