When creating a DSL (Domain Specific Language) one of the most important choices is to decide about what items in your domain are going to be considered variable, changeable and which ones are going to be considered fixed, carved in stone.
The former need to be specified in your DSL, in your design or may be coded. The latter are considered immutable and will remain static for all your derived applications for ages.
Considering that everything is static it is obviously useless. On the contrary, considering every aspect variable drives to another no-end getting nothing tangible again as a result. Therefore, in the middle we will have to search for the virtue.
The main issue here is to study a domain and ponder between variable parts and fixed parts. It is not a trivial thing to do from the very beginning. Experience in DSL construction and specially, experience in the domain helps to train your smell, but there are not clear rules for it, nevertheless.
It is not only about knowing your requirements. It is about trying to predict how your requirements will change across time and what types of requirements have more likelihood and tendency to change.
Adding variability
A variable part could be, for example, the background color of your application. If so, you need to add syntax and semantics to your DSL to capture such property. Let’s say you can express somewhere in your specification: { background-color = peach; }
We can select the peach color for app1, and may be ivory for app2.
However, nothing is for free and this freedom comes with the followings possible drawbacks:
- You need to increase the size of your language (DSL), editors, model checkers, compilers and code generation or interpreters.
- Users have to provide a value for such property unless you have also provided a sensible default value in case of missing information.
- Homogeneity across applications vanishes with respect to background-color. Now it’s a user choice (the one in control of the modeling tool).
- Specs are more complex.
Adding commonality
On the other hand, if you consider the background of your application should be always the same because you are following, for example, a user interface style guide then, the background color is a fixed issue. Its value is provided by design by a style guide, by an architect, or design choice and the user modeling has no control over it.
In this scenario, the DSL is smaller. No need to specify the background color, it is implicit, it is no included in the model/specification.
With this kind of choice, we are betting for standardization. A shared library, a runtime framework or an interpreter will take care of supplying the right color in the right moment.
- Users can not change the background color, specs are smaller.
- Standardization is improved across applications.
- User has no control on the feature.
But, what is the right choice?
It depends. There is no right choice with the information given till the moment. To answer the question we need to consider if the background color is a fundamental feature in our domain and it is needed to be different from application to application or may be, on the contrary, the color should be used in an homogeneous way following a predefined style guide.
Again, the domain imposes the rules to follow. Studding the domain and its variability is crucial to create a consistent DSLs focused in gathering the key features of the domain in a model: the important and variable ones. The important and fixed ones must be also identified but they shouldn’t be included into the model, but into the framework or the runtime.
Standards, policy assurance, compliance
Everything related to standard procedures, compliance and in-house stile guidelines are first-class candidates for standardization. If done in that way, your developers will not have to remember all that weird standard and compliance rules when developing a specific artifact.
A code generator will provide the right value for them. It will do it silently, without errors neither oversights. All the boring code dedicated to plumbing applications like: naming guidelines, service publication, serialization, persistence, adapters, proxies, skeletons, stubs, DAO code are driven by strict standards and best practices and are natural candidates for strong automation by code generators.
Moreover, if the regulation or the standard changes, the change will have impact in the following assets:
- a single change to a framework will be enough
- or a change to a code generator and then forcing a regeneration process and redeploy.
In both cases, it is cheaper that manually reviewing a set of in-production applications.
For example, think about replacing your data-layer access code from a DAO pattern and SQL to an ORM based approach like Hibernate.
Business Know-How
The core of the business Know-How is the important and the variable parts we are interested in to be collected in a specification. Such features need to be modeled, and if possible, abstracted from the technology that will implement it.
If we do it in this way, the model can survive the current technology.
Why we could be interested in do it in such a way?
Just because technology evolves like fashion. Today everyone likes red T-shirts, tomorrow blue jeans will be sublime! Basic, Cobol, C, Java, C#, Ruby… what is the next language to use in 5 years time?
Use your best bet, whatever platform better fulfills your requirements, but I it could be nice to see the business process surviving the technology. 
We don’t know in which direction, but technology will evolve, and will change for sure.
Maintaining a language or a DSL
When a DSL or a language needs a review you will be probably considering adding new features to the language.
Each new feature will increase the variability and increase the complexity of the language. Before deciding to add a new modeling feature make a cost/benefits analysis and double check that the valued added by the improvement is greater than the cost of implementing it.
I like to follow the golden rule proposed by Gordon S. Novak about automatic programming:
“Automatic Programming is defined as the synthesis of a program from a specification. If automatic programming is to be useful, the specification must be smaller and easier to write than the program would be if written in a conventional programming language.”
Conclusion
Whenever is possible:
- Business Know-How should be captured by models, specs, DSLs.
- Technical Know-How should be captured by code generators, model interpreters, best practices and patterns.
So, at the end of the day I like the following pair of quotes to sum up about what to include in a model:
- The Spanish writer Baltasar Gracián in the XVII century said “Lo bueno si breve, dos veces bueno.” (a literal translation from Spanish could be: “Good things if brief, twice good.”)
- On the other side, Albert Einstein (XX century) counterpoints “Things should be as simple as possible, but not simpler.”
