Grady Booch on verticalized tools and Domain Specific Languages

“...with IBM aligning more and more of its field to specific verticals, is that there is such a domain-specific language and culture in those verticals that you can get middleware”

Grady correctly identifies why the fabled “San Francisco Project” failed all those years ago - it was over engineered and was not based upon real-world business processes.  You can't simply make up patterns - they've got to be harvested from existing systems and implementations.  If no one has ever used something how can it be a pattern?  This is what IBM's researchers apparently forgot during the development of San Francisco.

This article is a little frusturating because it goes on to discuss how some people came over to Redmond from Rational to build something better and (even worse) wrongly implies that model-driven development wasn't happening prior to UML. 

Just saw this: an interesting white paper explaining the productivity benefits one might gain from adopting a domain specific language instead of UML.  Still confused?  Keith does a great job of explaining UML and DSLs.

“UML is the Unified Modeling Language, not the Universal Modeling Language” - Fred Bershears