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MatthewPhillips | 1 year ago

Writing a language, even a DSL is a lot of work. It's not enough to just make a good language, there's also a whole world of tooling support that people expect nowadays.

Also ultimately it was hard to sell the idea of living in a different file format from the rest of your code. This is always a tough sell for DSLs. Even languages as good as CSS and SQL struggle with this for a lot of devs.

discuss

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whilenot-dev|1 year ago

A JavaScript-only implementation of robot suffers a similar fate as a DSL without proper tooling, as states and actions are just some custom strings that need to be repeated, no? An implmenetation with good types would provide useful autocompletion, and I can see there was a similar conclusion and types have been implemented with generics. Haven't used it yet to confirm the behavior (at a first glance it seems like a few more strings would need to be inferred), but it would be helpful to mention this somewhere for us TypeScript folks.