I would be very unlikely to use someone's homegrown library specific 
scripting language.

However, if you want to make a library for an existing popular scripting 
language that handles your specific domain well, I'd be quite likely to 
use that if I had a problem with your domain and I was comfortable with 
the existing popular scripting language, i'd use it for sure. Odds are 
your domain is not really "libraries" (that's not really a software 
problem domain), but perhaps as Patrick suggests "dealing with 
relationships among semantic objects", and then odds are libraries are 
not the only people interested in this problem domain.

Some people like ruby because of it's support for creating what they 
call "domain specific languages", which I think is a silly phrase, which 
really just means "a libraryAPI at the right level of abstraction for 
the tasks at hand, so you can accomplish the tasks at hand concisely and 
without repeated code."  

Patrick Etienne wrote:
> Peter -
>
> I was bewildered at the notion of needing yet another scripting
> language, let alone one as "library domain-specific" (that wording
> alone throws up red flags everywhere), but I'm not here to bash ideas.
> Instead I looked up your site and read the small blurb about "Nova".
> It seems that the main objective behind your pursuit is creating a
> language that provides a specific data type for semantic objects (or
> relationships). I have to ask, what about semantic maps makes you
> believe that they require a specific data type rather than just being
> an object type? Are other scripting languages too slow to suit certain
> needs such that a new data type is necessitated? I really can't see
> this being the case. That being said, while it can be an invaluable
> experience to learn about making scripting languages, if there's to be
> any community movement toward a particular language (php, ruby, java,
> scheme or what have you) there has to be some very real and
> significant benefit.
>
> Or more directly, you seem to have specific ideas about a library
> domain-specific language. What do today's languages not have that you
> believe is so essential that you'd be willing to write a new scripting
> language?
>
>  - Patrick E.
>
> On Sat, Oct 30, 2010 at 10:51 AM, Peter Schlumpf
> <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>   
>> Bill, you hit a nail pretty squarely on the head.  I believe this decades long fetish with MARC has to go.  It was designed to efficiently store data on magtapes and doesn't make any sense in today's world.  It's a huge millstone around the neck of Libraryland and it keeps them stuck in that tiny little ghetto.  Anything can be a mind-prison, even PHP, Python or Django.  They are all arbitrary anyway.
>>
>> And you are correct in pointing out that the natural response of librarians to a problem is to seek consensus in a self-absorbed way.  Form committees and all that nonsense which never goes anywhere.  They are happy enough going around in circles, like the Nowhere Man making all his nowhere plans for nobody.
>>
>> My hope is that some among us would just undertake these problems ourselves.  Outside of the realm of the libraries and the limiting mindsets many of us work in.  We've all got ideas.  Fire up vi and get busy and make something happen, like a library domain-specific language.  Start fresh.  There is nothing wrong with that.  What's wrong is how the library community goes about such things.
>>
>> Let's go somewhere.
>>
>> Peter Schlumpf
>> www.avantilibrarysystems.com
>>     
>
>