Language oriented programming (LOP) is a style of computer programming in which, rather than solving problems in general-purpose programming languages, the programmer creates one or more domain-specific languages for the problem first, and solves the problem in those languages.
LOP is the programming paradigm I took on last year for the Content Type Rule Language (Ctrl). The Ctrl has several LOP characteristics:
- It is formally specified, that is, it has a grammar defined in EBNF.
- It is domain-oriented, focused on real-time event stream analytics.
- It is high-level: provides abstractions, compiles dynamically, and is interpreted.
While the initial effort in developing a DSL is quite large--specifying a grammar and writing an interpreter for the language took a considerable amount of time and wasn't easy--we now have a language in which to solve a wide range of event analytics problems.
The immediate pay off is a real change in the way I work. Now I think of new requirements almost entirely in terms of the DSL I designed. If the language needs a new construct or feature to solve a problem in a general way, I can extend it as needed. Language enhancements are easy. The Ctrl is so compact that a large amount of work can be accomplished in just a few lines of code. This keeps the Ctrl code base small even as the complexity of tasks accomplished by code written in the language, increases. LOP is powerful stuff.
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