At JAOO, James Gosling gave a talk before mine on his recent experience with the Autonomous Audi TT at Stanford. Within this presentation he talked about the use of Matlab and Simulink as Domain Specific Languages (DSL) for mechanical engineers. The tone of this, and even more so talking with people afterwards, was that somehow DSLs like these are not 'real languages' and are to be sneered at for their lack of scoping or inability have closures. Even the fact that when the translated code (from Matlab to Java) was shown to the engineers and they're said it didn't make sense to them was seen as an amusing anecdote about how misguided mechanical engineers are about software, the poor dears.
What unmitigated, bourgeois snobbery and arrogance.
All programming languages are DSLs, you dummies. Its just a different domain - that of current models of software. You are no better with computers than these people you sneer at. There is more of their code controlling the world and making it a better place for the majority of humanity than there is for the systems delivered by so called software engineers. We should be listening to them and helping them, not sneering at them and congratulating ourselves on our superiority. Need to destroy the 1v0ry towers we're inhabiting and learn a little humility.
Fully agree, but it is so human: when mastering a language you think that other languages are not needed…even in domains that you don’t know about. As said by Wittgenstein: The limits of MY LANGUAGE mean the limits of MY WORLD.
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