Many years ago (I will not reveal my age), I began working on my PhD thesis concerning the area of Domain-Specific Languages (DSLs). Research was booming at the time and many research articles stated in their introduction that DSLs are very useful and increase productivity, by reducing lines of code etc. All these claims seemed logical to me, but I always considered them something like urban legends. We all know that they are correct, but cannot easily prove it. Keeping that on the back of my mind, I searched for a way to bring the “legend” down to measurable facts that will provide solid motivation for the importance DSLs in every day programming. I decided to do a simple experiment that measures DSL usage in open source programs. Continue reading →