Oliver Steele

A domain-specific language is a language for dealing with a specific problem domain, such as students at a university or entries in a blog. DSL implementation has become so easy, and some of the domains have become so deep, that there’s now a market for subdomain-specific languages (SDSLs).
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I first met the folks at Laszlo Systems in December of 2000, when I was the CTO of AlphaMask. A decade earlier Laszlo’s founder David Temkin, my business parter Mike Reed, and I had all worked at Apple on technologies associated with the Newton. Mike and I were in San Francisco, and David invited us by to see Laszlo.

At the time, I had been thinking of getting someone from the MIT Media Lab to design a user interface that took advantage of AlphaMask’s animation and scaling capabilities to go beyond the desktop metaphor. When I saw what Laszlo was doing, I stopped considering this. “If I ever want to do anything interesting with 2D interfaces”, I thought, “I should do it at Laszlo”.

David was interested in licensing our graphics engine, but Laszlo didn’t have any money. A year later, in October 2001, Mike and I sold AlphaMask to OpenWave. And in November, Laszlo received its seed funding. David called us to ask whether our graphics engine was still available for licensing. It wasn’t, but I was. I signed a six month contract.

I agreed to work for Laszlo because I thought the technology was amazing, and because I was looking for something to do while I decided what I wanted to do longer term —- probably start a company in the Boston area. During my first six months a couple of things happened. One was that I realized this was a real company, with a business plan and business people as good as the engineers. Another was that I really enjoyed working with everyone. So six months later, instead of leaving Laszlo to start my own company, I suggested they hire me and start a Boston office, and a year later, here I am.

I’ve noticed that there’s two ways of giving directions to a location (say, when a driver pulls over to ask you how to get to a restaurant). Declarative directions specify where a location is relative to the current location; for example, “Two blocks ahead and across the street.” Procedural directions specify the steps that have to be taken to reach a location; for example, “Go straight three blocks, take a u-turn, go one block, and it’s the first building on your right.”
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I’m posting this from the lobby of the Westin Hotel in Santa Clara, the site of the O’Reilly Emerging Technology Conference. Laszlo has a major presence there, with a booth, a presentation, and a Birds-of-a-Feather session.
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Welcome to my blog! I’ll be using this space to write about languages, software, and cognition.
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