[Haskell-cafe] DSL question -- was: New slogan for haskell.org

[Mattias Bengtsson]

On Wed, 2007-12-19 at 13:03 -0500, Steve Lihn wrote:
[snip]
> I do come aross a question while reading the DSL page on Wikipedia.
> 
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domain-specific_programming_language
> 
> In the Disadvantage section (near the end), there is an item -- hard
> or impossible to debug. Can anybody explain why or what it means? 

I can't think of anything in the pure concept of Domain Specific
Languages that would make them hard or impossible to debug. You'd only
have to write a good debugger for the language.

> And how does it apply to Haskell?

A DSL embedded in Haskell has the advantage (and disadvantage) of being
normal Haskell code, hence the normal Haskell debuggers will work.
However, if the EDSL is presented as an entirely new language then
non-Haskellers will obviously have problems understanding the generic
Haskell debugger and error messages.

Mattias