This gets us ever closer to the goals of the elusive (and presumably abandoned?) Grok project [1].<p>I'd love to see syntax highlighters (like Pygments), editors and IDEs, autocompletion providers, debuggers, and all other language-related tooling consume a standardized canonical "language description format". Making a new language? Bam! It's automatically supported by Visual Studio, Eclipse, Emacs, vim, Sublime Text, gdb, Pygments, the list goes on.<p>The extension capabilities are also awesome. Let's say I have a huge project and, at a certain level of abstraction, users aren't allowed to use fprintf(stderr, ...), they need to use LOG(...). It would be great to have a file in your project that can tell your environment to give you the "red squigglies" and autofix information for such situations.<p><a href="http://bsumm.net/2012/08/11/steve-yegge-and-grok.html" rel="nofollow">http://bsumm.net/2012/08/11/steve-yegge-and-grok.html</a>
I hope some of the work they've done filters back into Nemerle. A lot of people were very excited when JetBrains picked up the Nemerle team but it's not clear that they have any intention of supporting the project - they just wanted the team...
I've been waiting for this for a year; the idea of having a language-within-a-language is extremely powerful.<p>Take our product: we have javascript, typescript, XML and SQL stored in strings in our C# codebase. As you can expect, these are really hard to maintain, and just has hard to move to separate templates.<p>Oh, did I mention that we also have our own templates, our own DSL, handlbar templates, jQuery templates and templates used in various libraries.<p>Nitra can support that all in one tool.
Am I being too simplistic when I think the following holds?<p>Easier to make a DSL => Wider adoption of new languages => Better grounds for experimentations => Much more creative stuff => More accessible technology