Ridiculous Thoughts

Thanks to everybody who attended my talk on DSL's yesterday at RailsConf. I had a lot of positive feedback and I thoroughly enjoyed giving it. A couple of great points came up in the Q&A session, that I will be addressing here over the next few of days.

1. Determining when you need a full fledged DSL vs. a library of classes and methods. In particular one person pointed out that deck.shuffle in my example was probably fine.

2. Is there (or should there be) a distinction between XML, or other mark-up, based DSLs and executable DSLs like the ones I was discussing.

I've posted the slides for my talk here. If you have feedback, positive or negative, on the talk or ideas on the above questions, please comment below!

Steve