Metaprogramming Ruby 2

The Case for Domain-Specific Languages

Are you old enough to remember Zork? It was one of the first “text adventures”: text-based computer games that were popular in the early 1980s. Here are the first few lines from a game of Zork:

West of house
You are standing in an open field west of a
white house, with a boarded front door.
You see a small mailbox here.
open mailbox
Opening the small mailbox reveals a leaflet.
take leaflet
Taken.

Suppose you have to write a text adventure as your next job. What language would you write it in?

You’d probably pick a language that’s good at manipulating strings and supports object-oriented programming. But whatever language you chose, you’d still have a gap between that language and ...