Home Purpose-Built Languages Mike Shapiro, Purpose-Built Languages, ACM Queue vol. 7, no. 1, February 2009. Mike Shapiro from Sun Microsystems examines the evolution of what he calls "purpose-built languages" (essentially domain-specific languages). Shapiro discusses the way that such languages have often been a key part of the development of larger software systems, and describes how many of them have sprung into existence and evolved without formal design. In particular, he traces the evolution of the adb debugger language. As Shapiro says: The debugger tale illustrates that a little purpose-built language can evolve essentially at random, have no clear design, no consistent grammar or parser, and no name, and yet endure and grow in shipping operating systems for more than 40 years. In the same time period, many mainstream languages came and went into the great beyond... For purpose-built languages, a deep connection to a task and the user community for that task is often worth more than clever design or elegant syntax. The same article also appeared in the April 2009 issue of Communications of the ACM. Comment viewing options Flat list - collapsed Flat list - expanded Threaded list - collapsed Threaded list - expanded Date - newest first Date - oldest first Select your preferred way to display the comments and click "Save settings" to activate your changes.