Design Guidelines for Domain Specific Languages

TL;DR

This paper presents a set of guidelines for designing high-quality, user-accepted domain-specific languages, based on experience and existing principles, to improve language quality and usability.

Contribution

It introduces a comprehensive set of design guidelines specifically tailored for domain-specific languages, addressing gaps in existing tool support.

Findings

Guidelines improve language quality and user acceptance.

Experience-based and literature-supported principles enhance DSL design.

Framework aids developers in creating better DSLs.

Abstract

Designing a new domain specific language is as any other complex task sometimes error-prone and usually time consuming, especially if the language shall be of high-quality and comfortably usable. Existing tool support focuses on the simplification of technical aspects but lacks support for an enforcement of principles for a good language design. In this paper we investigate guidelines that are useful for designing domain specific languages, largely based on our experience in developing languages as well as relying on existing guidelines on general purpose (GPLs) and modeling languages. We defined guidelines to support a DSL developer to achieve better quality of the language design and a better acceptance among its users.