Domain-Specific Languages in Kotlin

In the world of software development, communication is key. We communicate with machines through code, and with fellow developers through the structure and clarity of that code. Domain-Specific Languages (DSLs) are a powerful tool to enhance this communication, allowing us to express solutions in a language that is closely aligned with a particular problem domain. Kotlin, with its expressive syntax and powerful features, stands out as an excellent language for creating elegant and type-safe internal DSLs.

This chapter will guide you through the process of building a DSL in Kotlin. We’ll take a practical example that we have already used in previous chapters – defining a Book object with its authors and chapters – and construct a DSL that makes the creation of such objects intuitive and readable.

We have learned about lambdas with and without receivers, about extension functions, operator overloading, high-order functions...