Comment by derfurth
8 hours ago
Having worked with domain experts I concur on the difficult time they have expressing the rules of their domains.
Once I built a little domain-specific language for them, that was tested against old jobs to see if they contradicted the past; it was a nifty project and since then I am convinced that DSLs are underrated as a way to encode expertise.
Can you give an example (even if contrived) of how that would have looked ? I’m very curious !
I had the experts write markdown files that contained the rules looked somewhat like:
## 1A Rule name
Some prose explaining the rules liking to official documentation.
``` if municipality and inhabitants > 10000 then functionA else functionB ```
Then a trivial parser would extract the rules, the DSL was then handled by Lark[1]. So pretty simple, but it made collaborating with experts easier as simulated results would also output some markdown they could read.
1. https://lark-parser.readthedocs.io/en/stable/
Sounds like "Literate Programming", where the code and comments are reversed: instead of everything being code except what's marked as a comment, everything is a comment except what's marked as code.
I am also very interested!
Scala to the rescue, then! :)