The abstraction he offered, of having a tree and then visiting every node in that tree, made the most sense.

> One of the most common usages of this pattern is for the scenario where you’ve got a complex tree where tree nodes can be of many types, and you wish to traverse the tree — that is, visit every node in the tree — taking some actions or performing some computations as you go. The “double dispatch” part of it is that the actions you take as you visit nodes in the tree can depend on the runtime types of both the nodes in the tree, and the code performing the action.

That sounds like a parser. It accepts an AST and evaluates productions on its way through. Saying "actions you take ... depend on the runtime types of ... nodes ... and the code performing the action" sounds similar to sorting out how to mash tree-traversal and productions together.

In my compilers class we first wrote a code linter for our "Wombo" language (a simplified Java). Then we wrote something that built an AST. The core tree traversal code was the same, but the "productions" paired with nodes were different.

A DSL is a language with only a handful of users, each of which is usually in the normal path of employment (obvious exception: Chuck Moore). As soon as someone in a team that relies on a DSL leaves the loss of knowledge is immediate. Unlike any other language that you may have picked up in some other organization the DSL has instantly lost a sizeable fraction of those versed in it. It doesn't take many losses like to kill such a project.

Another problem is that even if the original authors hang around, the chances that they will stay fluent in their own DSL diminishes with increasing intervals between work on a particular project. If the code would be written in a 'normal' language then they would stay fluent.

So DSLs are not a good match for how we normally think about software, even though there is a 1:1 correspondence between the words in your typical DSL (say a FORTH word) and a function call. Functions tend to be written in terms of other functions, just like FORTH words are written in terms of other words, and yet, the standard library is never far away whereas with FORTH words it could easily be 30 words down before you hit the actual language.

I'd love to see something like a DSL based language but with longer term prospects, for a long time I hoped that Smalltalk would be that language but I have mostly given up on that.