Pavel Hruby’s book, Model-Driven Design Using Business Patterns (Springer Verlag, Berlin, 2006) is to my knowledge the best book on this topic. It’s a pattern book so the format is a bit dry but the contents are great. I keep coming back to it and have implemented it several times over the years.
Charles Simonyi and his Intentional Software tried to solve this, publishing some interesting articles in the 1990es. However their technology was not broadly used and they were acquired by Microsoft.
The key ideas are called Intentional Programming and Language Workbenches.
The best accessible implementation of that is JetBrains’ MPS (it is free). It allows you to define a language and “projectional” editors together.
It is really fascinating but it suffers from a learning curve where there is no small step from what people use in their everyday common languages and IDEs to building domain-specific solutions with MPS, so adoption is low.
Markus Voelter has some highly recommendable publications and elaborate applications of MPS for domains specific languages, see http://voelter.de/
I am sure there is something great in that area but it has not found the right form and shape yet, so keep exploring.
A rare mention of Intentional Programming aka IP (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intentional_programming) on HN. I first came to know of this from an article by Charles Simonyi titled "The Death of Computer Languages, The Birth of Intentional Programming" on MSDN. But alas, the promise never came to pass. The only other place i know of which covers it is a chapter in the book Generative Programming Methods, Tools, and Applications by Krysztof Czarnecki et al. IP is rather hard to understand (i still don't get it completely) and afaik there are no publicly available tools/IDEs to learn/play with it.
I don't believe Jetbrains MPS is a IP programming editor, it is meant for designing DSLs. IP has aspects of a DSL but is not the same.
Finally a huge upvote for mentioning Markus Voelter who is THE Expert in DSL design/implementation/usage. Checkout his articles/essays and the free ebook "Domain Engineering: Designing, Implementing and Using Domain-Specific Languages" from his above mentioned site.
The original Intentional Programming in the mid-nineties was a much broader vision than Language Workbenches, more like a grand unified theory of software development and related tools such as IDEs, languages, compilers, and a marketplace of components in that space.
My understanding, from the demos they were giving around 15 years ago, is that the Intentional company ended up focusing on a smaller feature set similar to MPS (I don’t have personal development experience with the Intentional product, only MPS).
It would be interesting to learn more about their work and lessons learned.
He explains it in the linked video presentation which is worth watching: the value being that your parser generator will complain about any ambiguity in the grammar (shift-reduce conflicts) rather than having that show up as a “wat?” at runtime.
You might argue that this argument reduces to checking the grammar using static analysis similar to the order generator. But then handwriting the parser is still extra work and risk.
What I've seen most nontrivial projects do (and have done in a commercial product myself) is to start with a parser generator then move to hand written parsers when UX and polish become a bigger priority than exploring the problem space.
The parser generator grammar spec can then be used to generate random test cases and compare the output of the new parser with the old one to make sure they're identical.
Now, it is served in avantgarde restaurants: e.g. by the Spanish Michelin star chef, Angel León. He is known as “chef del mar”, making novel dishes with the plants from the ocean in his restaurant, Aponiente:
https://www.aponiente.com/en/
The Greenland Saga (Grænlendinga saga) has more information on the journey if you can read Icelandic, but there is no English translation in this database at the moment.
The actual discovery was not by Erik but by an earlier voyage around 985 by Bjarni, who navigated the coast but decided not to enter the unknown land. The later voyage was inspired by his information.
The vikings considered the journey from Greenland to Vinland the most dangerous journey in their trading network, navigating storms and icebergs in their open boats. However, Vinland provided a source of valuable wood, a scarce resource around their homes in Greenland.
There is archeological evidence of their visits on Newfoundland. You can visit their site in L'Anse aux Meadows with distinct viking houses and metal artefacts:
The Toyota Production System was established during Shoichiro Toyoda's leadership. It is the company's "operating system" if you will, and has made an enormous impact, both in the auto industry and in other fields such as IT.
"Lean" manufacturing, a term from Womack & Jones, is based on their research into this.
If you want to dive in, here is my reading list for essential books on how Toyota came to build high quality cars at scale, and how it transfers to other disciplines.
W. Edwards Deming - the grand old man of the field, building on a strict statistical discipline. His book "Out of the Crisis" is a wonderful treatise on his thinking including his famous "14 Points for Management". This is definitely a must read that will change the way you think about management and quality. Deming provided the inspiration for the quality movement that powered post-war Japanese manufacturing.
Taiichi Ohno - one of the greatest industrial innovators of the 20th century, the father of the Toyota Production System. After spending his career relentlessly optimizing manufacturing at Toyota he wrote the book "Toyota Production System: Beyond Large-scale Production" that describes his work.
Womack & Jones - Their books are great and it is well worth to read them all to see a lot of the principles and case studies for lean thinking. Also, it is quite interesting to see that software development is now rediscovering some of the things that manufacturing learned much earlier - in the case of Toyota as early as in the 1950s and 1960s. Begin your studies with "The Machine That Changed the World", a five-year study of the global auto industry from MIT and go on with the "Lean Thinking" and "Lean Solutions". They give a fascinating perspective on manufacturing and plenty of examples of the lean principles and they applications. These are the books that brought lean to the mainstream.
Mary and Tom Poppendieck - with a background in manufacturing and software they were leading the effort to translate the concepts of lean to software development. They have written two great books, "Implementing Lean Software Development" and "Lean Software Development - an Agile Toolkit". Both books are well worth reading a present a both the principles and lot of cases in a friendly, colloquial manner. Highly recommended!
Matthew May - I really like his approach to elegance and simplicity. May has worked with Toyota and their corporate university and his book "The Elegant Solution" offers insight into their innovation process - the principles it is built on and the practices that make it work.
Jeffrey Liker - his "The Toyota Way" is a very good introduction to the application of lean methods at Toyota. This is one of the best lean books I have read. Definitely a favourite!
This list covers up to around 10 years ago. Please comment with recommendations for more recent books on the topic.
Tetsuo Sakiya - Honda Motor the men, the management, the machines
Tangential: there are many books on the Toyota system, so that they have stolen the show. I have always suspected that other Japanese factories might have also had interesting production systems but only found the above book about Honda. Honda apparently invested more in R&D and always took greater risks than Toyota. I believe some ideas from there can also be applied to IT.
The Honda Myth by Masaaki Sato is an excellent book about Soichiro Honda and Takeo Fujisawa and the captivating history of how they built Honda, from motorcycles to Formula 1 and how they disrupted the US auto industry on the way with the low-emission fuel-efficient CVCC engine (the later Tesla story shares some of the same elements of new tech playing to environmental regulation).
It was driven by the quest to create the best engines and fastest vehicles.
Soichiro Honda had a great love for building and tuning his engines, saying something like,
“It will be a sad day if engineers could go to lunch without needing to wash their hands”.
Great list. I would strongly suggest reading Ward's Lean Product and Process Developer, or if you have, adding it to the list. It focuses entirely on product development rather than manufacturing -- so easier to apply to software development!
The Dutch tax authority has developed RegelSpraak a controlled natural language for defining tax rules that is also formally specified and compilable to several targets.
There is a video of the team presenting how they built the DSL for tax rules in the JetBrains MPS language workbench from the MPS conference.
