unbox ( this ) !

I'm trying to understand what Don Box talks about in this lang.net talk

3-07 - Modeling and Languages - Don Box


The talk is about representation independence (oxymoron?), declarative forms and abstractions. It has a historic point of view, showing how abstraction has been applied.

But he is careful not to really talk about anything concrete with respect to what Microsoft is doing now. The talk is done in a slideshow driven by a domain-specific XAML for slideshows transformed into a WPF model.

That in and of itself is nothing special, it's a bit like XSLT+XML => HTML+CSS.

To me the talk has a certain "Intentional" smell to it. I'm guessing we may finally see Microsoft move towards a model where we have domain-specific representations, domain-specific presentations and domain-specific input models.

The "two beers" test is not passed because the slideshow is encoded in a CLR specific XML dialect (XAML). If there was a DSL editor for it, it would be, not to say idiotproof, but domain-proof, and with all noise absent.

I really really hope that is the case.

Could WPF play a role here, or is there some new UI framework underway...

He also talks about search. That leads more towards a type-aware filesystem. It's like "I really really want to tell you about this, but here's some vague headlines to get your attention".

So I see

- models
- model representations
- model presentations (visual representations)
- model interactions
- model-based filesystems
- model-based search

Oppinions?