Advantages and disadvantages

advantages ? Domain-specific languages allow solutions to be expressed in the idiom and at the level of abstraction of the problem domain. Consequently, domain experts themselves can understand, validate, modify, and often even develop domain-specific language programs. ? Self-documenting code. ? Domain-specific languages enhance quality, productivity, reliability, maintainability, portability and reusability. ? Domain-specific languages allow validation at the domain level. As long as the language constructs are safe any sentence written with them can be considered safe.

disadvantages ? Cost of learning a new language vs. its limited applicability ? Cost of designing, implementing, and maintaining a domain-specific language as well as the tools required to develop with it (IDE) ? Finding, setting, and maintaining proper scope. ? Difficulty of balancing trade-offs between domain-specificity and general-purpose programming language constructs. ? Potential loss of processor efficiency compared with hand-coded software. ? Proliferation of similar non-standard domain specific languages, i.e. a DSL used within insurance company A versus a DSL used within insurance company B. ? Non-technical domain experts can find it hard to write or modify DSL programs by themselves.