How domain-specific languages can improve software quality

Domain-specific languages are programming languages tailored for a particular domain. They have first-class constructs to efficiently express the subject matter of that domain, and they are often used by subject matter experts who don't consider themselves programmers — tax law experts, healthcare professionals, or physicists. If used right, DSLs can have a significant positive impact on software quality: errors relating to the subject matter can be more easily detected because of the closer alignment with the domain's subject matter and the low-level code is automatically generated, avoiding random mistakes of implementation.

In this talk, Markus will present examples of how DSLs are used to express complex subject matter, how non-programmers can write tests on the level of abstraction of the domain, and how we can assure that the code generation from the DSL to the target platform doesn't produce faulty implementation code. Speaker will present examples from the financial, government, and healthcare domains.