Is this "a new generation discovers DSLs"? I had 15 minutes of fame inside IBM in the 80s by saying "The good news about FORTH is you can extend the parser to create your own Domain Specific Language. The bad news is the guy down the hallway already has."
There are a couple things going on here:
1. DSLs aren't "bad." But they may require more forethought than you typically have had to apply to typical programming tasks.
2. Doesn't perl6 do something similar? It was about the only thing about perl6 I liked. Insert reference to your favourite dynamic grammar system: icon? forth? some lisps?
3. something that is sorta new to think about is SQL is supposed to be a declarative language and behind the scenes there's a planner that knows what to do to put a particular record in a particular state. And yeah, you're doing something similar, changing the semantic rules to produce an AST, which you're still using with previously coded code to determine the semantics of the thing you wrote in the new grammar. But that's essentially what the OP said here.
4. I agree with the author that maybe PEGs aren't the most awesome thing in the world, but they seem to be well understood and actually doing something is better than trying to mzke things perfect.
5. I liked the author's write-up, but as an old programmer take umbrage at the idea that changing your parser in the middle of a program is "crazy", we used to do this... well maybe not all the time... but with a greater frequency than we do today.
There are a couple things going on here:
1. DSLs aren't "bad." But they may require more forethought than you typically have had to apply to typical programming tasks.
2. Doesn't perl6 do something similar? It was about the only thing about perl6 I liked. Insert reference to your favourite dynamic grammar system: icon? forth? some lisps?
3. something that is sorta new to think about is SQL is supposed to be a declarative language and behind the scenes there's a planner that knows what to do to put a particular record in a particular state. And yeah, you're doing something similar, changing the semantic rules to produce an AST, which you're still using with previously coded code to determine the semantics of the thing you wrote in the new grammar. But that's essentially what the OP said here.
4. I agree with the author that maybe PEGs aren't the most awesome thing in the world, but they seem to be well understood and actually doing something is better than trying to mzke things perfect.
5. I liked the author's write-up, but as an old programmer take umbrage at the idea that changing your parser in the middle of a program is "crazy", we used to do this... well maybe not all the time... but with a greater frequency than we do today.