Design Guidelines for Domain Specific Languages
This work addresses the challenge for DSL developers in achieving better design outcomes, but it is incremental as it builds on existing guidelines without introducing a new method.
The paper tackles the problem of error-prone and time-consuming domain-specific language (DSL) design by investigating guidelines to improve language quality and user acceptance, based on experience and existing principles from general-purpose and modeling languages.
Designing a new domain specific language is as any other complex task sometimes error-prone and usually time consuming, especially if the language shall be of high-quality and comfortably usable. Existing tool support focuses on the simplification of technical aspects but lacks support for an enforcement of principles for a good language design. In this paper we investigate guidelines that are useful for designing domain specific languages, largely based on our experience in developing languages as well as relying on existing guidelines on general purpose (GPLs) and modeling languages. We defined guidelines to support a DSL developer to achieve better quality of the language design and a better acceptance among its users.