James Lu started this thread by quoting me. Thank you, James, for the compliment. And I feel somewhat obliged to contribute here, are at removed I started the thread.
In the message James quoted, I also said <quote> But most strengths, in another situation, can be a weakness. Language design is often a compromise between conciseness and readability, ease of use and performance, good for beginners and good for experts, and many other factors. Such as innovation and stability. Guido's decisions, as BDFL, have shaped Python and its community into what it is now. It is one set of compromises. Other languages, such as Ruby, have made different compromises. Now that the BDFL is on vacation, the challenge is to maintain the essence of Python while continuing to innovate. </quote> It's important, of course, for the developers of a DSL to understand the domain. I'm starting to learn http://elm-lang.org/. It describes itself as > A delightful language for reliable webapps. > Generate JavaScript with great performance and no runtime exceptions. The Elm developers have learnt a great deal from Python, and I think that we in turn can learn from them. Particularly about catching coding errors early, with good feedback. But that's a different thread. So I'd say to focus on improving the API to an existing library is a good way to develop our understanding of DSLs more generally. James provided a Keras example model.add(Dense(units=64, activation='relu', input_dim=100)) model.add(Dense(units=10, activation='softmax')) What might be better here, if allowed, is model.extend([ Dense(units=64, activation='relu', input_dim=100), Dense(units=10, activation='softmax'), ]) Another approach would be to provide a fluent interface. https://martinfowler.com/bliki/FluentInterface.html https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fluent_interface Done this want, we might get something like jQuery ( model .dense(units=64, activation='relu', input_dim=100) .dense(units=10, activation='softmax') ) JSON and XML and YAML have already been mentioned. Here's another, XML-ish approach. A combined list-dictionary is quite common. It's used widely in XML (and SGML before it). So how to create such. A few years ago I experimented with an API such as A(a=1, b=2)[ X(1, 2, 3), Y[ ....], ] As I recall, someone told me that https://kivy.org does something similar. Kivi and Elm, are systems I'd like to learn. Ease of use is important in language and library design. We can learn from the success of others, as well as from our own successes and failures (smile). -- Jonathan _______________________________________________ Python-ideas mailing list Python-ideas@python.org https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-ideas Code of Conduct: http://python.org/psf/codeofconduct/
