I’m just back from the Professional Developer Conference (PDC) in Los Angeles. I feel so jet-lagged that I don’t even know what time it is anymore. It’s dark and surely I should sleep, but my fingers keep typing on the keyboard as if they were taking on a life of their own.

Thanks to “Oslo”, the new platform for model-driven applications, I’m creating a simple textual Domain Specific Language (DSL). It’s a throwaway project, but I know my next one will be more ambitious.

I take another glance at the MGrammar language specification and I’m ready to code again. I expand my running example a bit to explore a potential scenario. Intellipad’s dynamic parser evaluates my language on the fly and duly reports some errors. No problem. I extend my grammar a tiny little more until I have no further warnings. I figured I can design my language interactively by example: it’s fun and totally test-driven!

I stare out my window for a moment, dreaming about a possible future. Writing DSL parsers is becoming such a trivial job that the need for many pesky visual DSL designers, noisy XML configuration files, and messy code-generation solutions may soon fade. With the exception of few notable scenarios (e.g. data transmission), I may very well enjoy the end of XML’s supremacy as a default file format.

I know, it’s just a dream. I’ll better go back to my task and write some more code.