[BangPypers] Wall street may embrace Python

[Sirtaj Singh Kang]

On 26-Apr-10, at 4:47 PM, Rajeev J Sebastian wrote:
[snip]
> With all due respect, I disagree that a DSL is useful for this
> purpose. In fact, I would disagree with DSLs in most cases, especially
> if its supposed to be used for programming. The reason for this is
> that creating a good language is much more harder than creating a
> language, and such efforts tend to end up with crappy languages.
>

Your concern is valid, but I think you are underestimating the amount  
of effort already being put into creating platform-neutral DSLs for  
business, law and finance. Hint: an XML schema is a declarative  
specification of a DSL, albeit one with terrible, human-antagonistic  
syntax. Even the SEC document contains such a thing already, as Anand  
quoted in an earlier email in this thread. Here are some other examples:

http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/tc_cat.php?cat=lawgov
http://www.legalxml.org/
http://www.service-architecture.com/xml/articles/finance_xml.html
http://www.omg.org/technology/documents/br_pm_spec_catalog.htm

What all these share in common is lack of human-friendly concrete  
syntax. That is the real problem to be solved, but it remains to be  
seen who will solve it and whether the vendors of eye-wateringly  
expensive middleware have the motivation to do so.

-Taj.