“Domain Specific Languages” by Martin Fowler

In 2011, Martin Fowler wrote “Domain Specific Languages” published by Addison-Wesley. Examples of domain specific languages you might have encountered before are regular expression specifications, Makefiles, Direct3D’s high level shader language (HLSL), OpenGL’s GL shader language (GLSL), the Wavefront object file format (.obj) or input specifications to the compiler tools lex (.l) and yacc (.y). Fowler defines a domain specific language as “a computer programming language of limited expressiveness focused on a particular domain.” Domain specific languages (DSLs) have been around for a long time, but to date there hasn’t been any general treatment of the techniques and characteristics of DSLs in general, as opposed to the traits of a particular DSL. Fowler’s book is a good first entry.