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What The Article Is Really Talking About (Score:1)
That's unfortunate. It should be.
When you write a DSL--a real DSL, with a parser and everything--you have the chance to choose your own syntax. That syntax can, and probably should, be appropriate to your domain. (You're writing a DSL because building a little language is the most appropriate way to solve domain problems, right?)
There's nothing wrong with that.
There's also nothing wrong with not writing a DSL. There's nothing wrong with writing a good API.
However, the concerns of writing a good API are different, in some ways, from the concerns of writing a good DSL. For one thing, you already have a pre-determined set of syntax you have to use. You have more constraints (at least unless you want to discuss LL or LALR, and I don't). I think the goals of each are different, too. With regard to an API, your goals should include clarity, correctness, and simplicity. The goals of writing a DSL include expressivity and succinctness, and perhaps learnability for domain experts who are not necessarily programmers.
Those goals are not always in alignment.
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