Neal Ford Talks About DSL vs. API Design

Following up with Bloch’s presentation on Effective API design, I would encourage those that are interested in programming languages to look through Neal Ford’s slides on Language Oriented Programming, which does a brief comparison on DSL vs. API design, along with how to construct good bases for DSLs in Java.

I found this presentation invigorating, and it got me very excited. This is a refreshing new way of looking at software design, and would address many of the ugly legacy design patterns that we have inherited specifically due to J2EE. I look forward to seeing more Java frameworks evolve towards a design similar to JMock, which accurately captures behaviour, rather than function.