I’m absolutely not a fan of Borland’s products. In Brazil we have a very large community of Delphi programmers and I’ve got a deep taste what is to live in a place where the software development cultural circles were created by that company.

Anyway, if you are giving a talk on Domain-Specific Languages please add it to your list of big names putting money on the concept. Borland just announced that its Together tools are going to support Language oriented Programming:

Borland’s Together tools have long been a primary example of a toolset that implements Unified Modeling Language, […] But UML is a general purpose modeling vocabulary. Borland wants to close the gap between what business users say they need and what can be represented in the software diagram.

To do that, it is offering a DSL Toolkit or domain specific language tools as part of Borland Together 2007.

The toolkit aims to help project teams overcome the complexity of UML models with terms and notations that reflect a specific business domain, such as designing the software controller that manages an airbag in an automobile. Automotive crash experts know when and how they want to deploy an airbag but translating that expertise into software requires a domain specific language, notes Richard Gronback, chief scientist at Borland, in an interview.

I don’t know about you but the sentence “close the gap between what business users say they need and what can be represented in the software diagram” makes me worry about what the heck Borland thinks a DSL is about. The fact that the company has split into Codegear,the IDE and programming arm, and the actual Borland, focusing in ALM, I am very confused that the ALM (modeling, SCM…) company is the one behinds the DSL initiative.

Borland says it has got a “new and unique Domain Secific Language (DSL) toolkit”, since I don’t have a BDN registration to get a free demo I just skimmed around the presentation in flash. they talk about BPM, MDA, Quality Assurance… couldn’t find anything on that so called DSL toolkit.

A quick search brought me a white paper from which I quote:

The investment made by Borland to support the latest Microsoft® technologies is very significant. For example, CaliberRM™, which is the first fully integrated requirements management solution for Team System, is recommended by Microsoft to complement the basic requirements functionality delivered by VSTS. Borland plans to continue to enhance the synergies between the Java and .NET platforms by providing additional capabilities such as UML to C# code generation and support for Microsoft Domain Specific Languages (Microsoft’s alternative to UML).

Same old Borland…