Deciding when to use any language--including Ruby--depends on the appropriateness to task and the amount of yak shaving necessary. Zed Shaw explains when Ruby's MRI or JRuby is the best language for the job, and when it really isn't.

New language development. While Ruby can build very nice DSLs, any errors in the DSL source aren't specified in that language, but instead, as Ruby errors. That's confusing. If your intention is to provide a language that a financial analyst can use to do her day job, then the error "undefined local variable 'var' for main:Object" is not helpful. In this case, you'd need a real parser with actual error checking and a better syntax that's not dependent on Ruby's?and this is where Ruby falls flat in practice.

There are libraries available for Ruby that can generate lexers and parsers, and plenty of templating engines for code generation, but most of these tools are poorly documented. You can find books for many of the Java, C or C++ based tools, and a trained language implementer can crank out simple DSLs with them in a few days to a week.

pcalcado wrote:
Alé disso, a crítica do inicio do artigo é meio estranha. Com TreeTop você cria uma DSL externa mais facilmente qe com ANTLR.

Paulo Silveira wrote:Desde quando escrever BNF e usar ANTLR foi facil? heehhehe

Paulo Silveira wrote:Desde quando escrever BNF e usar ANTLR foi facil? heehhehe

cv wrote:link, louds?