> On Aug 25, 2018, at 2:45 AM, Richard Parsons <[email protected]> wrote: > > Hello > > I'm a lawyer practising from a small firm in the UK. I am also a > Racket-hobbyist. > …. > Many thanks for your attention. > > Richard
Richard, let me add two comments to those you already received: 1. Some of what you’re asking for seems to exist. I am not an expert on office software, and the little I see gets the work done for staff but looks awful to me as a quasi-sw-dev. So, do you want to save money, or is there really a significant market gap, or is your intent to build good products that you can eventually sell as a separate sideline of your business? 2. Sw people routinely see DSLs as a panacea and the staff who ends up using them want nothing to do with them (unless the DSLs are literally invisible to them). A great example is the “financial contracts” effort by Simon Peyton Jones (GHC co-creator, UK) and Marc Eber (financial/MBA-style expert, Paris France). The latter took their joint paper and turned it into a company for financial traders who deal with complex contracts. 10 years on, he reported on his experience and the near-failure experience. The financial traders (French and Hungarian clients if I recall this correctly) hated to work with the DSL and program editors even though there was clearly value to it They were used to spreadsheet-like software, and they had always done it that way, and they didn’t want to change their ways. So Eber added a GUI to his financial DSL and all of a sudden, it became a reasonable success. Now Racket has the kind of GUI framework that allows you to connect DSLs with interaction — beyond what drracket provides. [[ We do have a research effort running here at Northeastern, dubbed define-editor, that sounds like it would be helpful if it were done. Right now, your examples might merely serve as a good example and motivational case for our effort. ]] — Matthias -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Racket Users" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
