Tomas Petricek - Domain Specific Languages, the functional way

In software development, we often face the same problem over and over again. For example, when designing user-interfaces, we need to specify the layout of components; when designing financial systems, we need to detect various patterns in changing prices. The Domain Specific Language (DSL) approach is to design a language for the specific problem domain and then use it repeatedly to solve multiple instances of the same problem.

In this talk, we look how to think about DSLs in a functional way. This lets us focus on the domain. Rather than worrying about the syntax, we start by understanding what problems we actually want to model and what is the best way to do so. Along the way, we’ll look at three fun examples ranging from a language for building 3D objects to a language for detecting price change patterns.

Get ready for some live coding in F#, but don’t worry if you have not done much F# before! You can use the ideas from this talk in any programming language and I’ll introduce all the necessary F# along the way.