It’s an existing, standard, language for describing grammars. Quite clearly the trade-off being made here. Seemingly not the one you would’ve made. Don’t act like it’s objectively bad.
in a string. I didn't say the DSL was novel. I learnt BNF too. (It does have extras that are either unique to it or standard beyond my familiarity though.)
I was always surprised at how the Ruby community talks about DSLs when using Ruby classes and catch all methods, overloading, etc. Nothing bad with it, but I feel it is not really a language, just very dynamic Ruby code.
A DSL that is a string, while having some downsides, does not have the arbitrary limitations of the "host" language. Either approach has its pros an cons.
I'm not that versed in Ruby, but I think similarly say the Django ORM in Python borders on DSL - especially with use of bitwise operators to build a query.
It's the tooling aspect that's my gripe with it in a string really, it makes it less likely (and more editor-specific) that I can have syntax highlighting, LSP, etc. That's incidentally the only way in which I don't prefer SQL to Django ORM - i.e. it really isn't that it's a DSL (SQL) that bothers me, it's the string.
But hopefully obviously it's not a big deal, I was just surprised at the look of it when I saw it described as 'really nice' and that the project describes itself as 'focussed on ergonomics'. It just doesn't seem brilliant to me, fine perhaps, par for the course apparently, but not remarkable.
