Hi everyone, I’m Davide Lettieri. I’m a .NET developer working in the Insurance sector, in these days I’m reading Pierce’s “Types and programming languages” and I’m wondering if a DSL could help the company I work for.
Being part of this community is going to be a challenge for me but I hope to learn and to give back something.
Thanks for having me!
D
Hi Davide, welcome in the community!
We are starting to have a decent shares of Italians here, nice.
Regarding figuring out if a DSL could help your company, @sergej, @voelter and I are working on process to answer that question. We will share in the coming weeks more about that, however that is a service for organizations, while you are probably asking yourself this question as an individual contributor.
First of all we should understand what you mean by DSL and what is your intent with it.
In my experience the DSLs that makes the biggest difference “business DSLs”: DSLs intended to be used by domain experts who are not developers. They are different from “technical DSLs” which are intended targeting developers. While technical DSLs can make developers more productive, the gain is smaller than with business DSLs.
If you want to build a business DSL, that is already something good. The next question is to understand the background of your users. Are they good at formal thinking? In my experience these categories are good and would be ideal users of DSLs: engineers, accountants, analysts. They are all used to be very precise in what they express, and because of this they tend to “get” DSLs more quickly. Medical doctors instead tend to be more vague. So, if your intended users are insurance analysts that have the habit of doing precise calculations of risks to calculate the reasonable premium to offer I think you are into something. I think there have been other cases of persons who worked within the insurance sector. For example, the guys behind @openVALIDATION built a systems of validation rules used within insurance companies.
Ok, I will stop bothering you but I think this would be an interesting discussion and I encourage you to chat about this and other topics in this community.