> On Aug 25, 2018, at 2:45 AM, Richard Parsons <r...@redwoodlegal.co.uk> wrote: > > Hello > > I'm a lawyer practising from a small firm in the UK. I am also a > Racket-hobbyist. > …. > Many thanks for your attention. > > Richard
Richard, let me add two comments to those you already received: 1. Some of what you’re asking for seems to exist. I am not an expert on office software, and the little I see gets the work done for staff but looks awful to me as a quasi-sw-dev. So, do you want to save money, or is there really a significant market gap, or is your intent to build good products that you can eventually sell as a separate sideline of your business? 2. Sw people routinely see DSLs as a panacea and the staff who ends up using them want nothing to do with them (unless the DSLs are literally invisible to them). A great example is the “financial contracts” effort by Simon Peyton Jones (GHC co-creator, UK) and Marc Eber (financial/MBA-style expert, Paris France). The latter took their joint paper and turned it into a company for financial traders who deal with complex contracts. 10 years on, he reported on his experience and the near-failure experience. The financial traders (French and Hungarian clients if I recall this correctly) hated to work with the DSL and program editors even though there was clearly value to it They were used to spreadsheet-like software, and they had always done it that way, and they didn’t want to change their ways. So Eber added a GUI to his financial DSL and all of a sudden, it became a reasonable success. Now Racket has the kind of GUI framework that allows you to connect DSLs with interaction — beyond what drracket provides. [[ We do have a research effort running here at Northeastern, dubbed define-editor, that sounds like it would be helpful if it were done. Right now, your examples might merely serve as a good example and motivational case for our effort. ]] — Matthias -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Racket Users" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to racket-users+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
