There is an alphabet, words, grammar, statements, semantics, and various ways to organize the previous in order to create a computer program in a programming language. Flex helps developers create a tool called a lexical analyzer which identifies the words of a program during the compilation/interpretation process.
Laziness, impatience and hubris are the three great virtues that each programmer should have, at least according to Larry Wall [1]. My experience so far showed me that he was right. All programmers have these characteristics, if they do not, usually they are not real programmers. Since they are expressing these values with the usage of several programming languages, they tend to compare them. Usually this comparison ends up with a phenomenon called flame wars. The programmers are participating in endless quarrels, exchanging arguments regarding language features, their standard (or not) libraries, etc. Continue reading
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