DSL or API

The O'reilly blog actually has a pretty funny write-up on the overuse of people calling everything a DSL named "The 'Is It a DSL or an API?' Ten Question Checklist.

Some of my favorites were:

1. Houston temporary fencing
2. Chicago temporary fencing
3. Los Angeles temporary fencing
4. temporary fencing New York City
5. Honolulu HI temporary fencing
6. Arlington temporary fencing

Have you ever programmed in a language other than Ruby? (PHP and HTML don’t count.) If not, it’s a DSL.

Is the defining syntactic feature that you’ve cleverly left the parentheses off of a list of function arguments? If so, it’s a DSL.

Is the code primarily a list of key-value pairs? Welcome to DSL Town, population you!

Are there colons on the front of otherwise-normal English nouns? Did it hurt when your DSL fell down from heaven?

Read the whole thing here