In a post to his site Ewan Valentine looks at some considerations to think about when creating a domain specific language in your applications. This kind of language helps define common terms, conventions and practices for developers to follow in their code.

When you spin up a framework such as Laravel, Symfony etc. The first thing you'll notice, is that they have their own 'feel'. I often joke that Symfony2 is like Java and Laravel is like Ruby.

But what gives an application or a framework a 'feel'? Domain specific language or 'DSL'. Domain specific language is almost like a syntax or a language specific to your application and ecosystem. DSL is what makes your applications code unique and more usable.

He gives a specific example of a Laravel application he was creating and how he wanted the interface to function, transforming the result of a find() into a JSON response. He shows how it could actually be done but that introduces more maintenance and more code to cover. Instead he worked backwards into the domain context the request was operating in and found an ideal injection point for transformation that would keep it out of the controller action itself.

So, to design usable domain specific syntax, start at the front. In other words the part you'll be writing the most, and then work backwards to abstract the logic and make it actually work.