Fluidic APIs are stupid... NOT!

People rave about Ruby with its fancy schmancy ability to construct internal DSL's (Domain Specific Languages). The oft-touted example is:

20.minutes.ago

In .net we now have 'extension methods', which let us do all sorts of lingustic gymnastics, including 20.minutes.ago (albeit with a few extra brackets in C#) (phil haack posted an example 6.months.ago)

But the examples are all a little contrived: 20.minutes.ago happens to form a logical chain where each word passes a value to the following word. But very few phrases are like that.

The real question is: can we turn all of our .net code into fluidic and beautiful prose?

Can we implement, for example, the Shakespeare Programming Language as an internal DSL, in C#?

Here goes...

No, actually, I'm not that brave. I'm going to try something far simpler -- converting a common line of real C# into a more grammatically correct form.

Here's the common line of C#:

if (!this.IsPostBack)

It would translate into plain english as:

"if this is not a post back"

So, subtituting spaces for dots, brackets and so on, a fluid interface might say:

if (this.is.not.a.postback))

...Can it be done?

If I went easy on myself I could change it to:

I could do it the cheaty way, and create a 'is_not_a_postback' method... but that's against the spirit of the thing.

The tricky bit is the word 'not' -- i figured it would create a clone of the object, then use reflection to visit each boolean property, and set the value to it's logical opposite. That's bad though, cause firstly "IsPostBack" is a readonly property -- so we can't reverse it (without accessing internal state... heh heh) and secondly, setting those properties might have unwanted side effects... so forget it.

At this point I could either email some of the world's greatest .net minds and get them to work on the problem around the clock while i head off to sleep. Or I could apply a model-driven architecture approach:

If the facts don't fit the model -- it's time to change the facts.

Yes, I think a more appropriate modern grammatical form of our code would be:

if (this.iz.a.postback.__NOT__)

(again -- with a few extra empty brackets in C#)

iz, and a can be implemented as what i'd term "empty non-modifier repeater extension methods" or "pass through" methods, both implemented like this:

    public static Object iz(this Object obj)
    {
        return obj;
    }

postback is a "synonymous extension method", a simple wrapper on IsPostBack:

    public static bool postback(this System.Web.UI.Page pg)
    {
        return pg.IsPostBack ;
    }

__NOT__ is "the logical inversion extension method", embellished with Textile-style __underlining__ and some nice SHOUTING.

    public static bool __NOT__(this bool that)
    {
        return !that;
    }

if  this iz   a   postback   __NOT__   

With a few more empty non-modifiers we can expand our code into the more common English form:

   if  this iz  um  
      like   a   well   um   like  
      a   youknow   postback   um   thing
      i_mean  __NOT__   mkay   yeh  

And maybe now i see why Microsoft really added extension methods. It's bound to um, y'know like, encourage more kids to become programmers. NOT.

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