I’m having a lot of trouble really sitting down and defining my data manipulation and translation language. I come up with several ways to describe how to accomplish certain tasks, but then those fail to fit another type of task. Or I may find a way to do this one more difficult task, yet the simpler tasks do not fit into this paradigm. It’s giving me a lot of trouble.

Some ideas I’ve come up with are more imperative language style, and certainly the most flexible and powerful options. But these ideas don’t really fit with the concept of a language designed to easily transform and move data. Most designs I’ve come up with tend to lean toward a more declarative type of language, or what is known as a Domain specific language. The idea fits it after all.

Declarative language focuses on the result, not HOW to achieve the result. An example would be HTML. You do not explicitly write code to render output, but instead you write what the end result is to look like using “markup”.

Here is an example of an idea I was tossing around for mapping columns in a data source to a target, and a few going through transformers, or filters.

source.differentId -\> adamImport.employee.employeeId  
source.first\_name -\> adamImport.employee.firstName  
source.phoneNumber -\> /[\^0-9]/ "" -\> /([0-9]{3})([0-9]{3})([0-9]{4})/
"(\$1) \$2-\$3" -\> source.employee.homePhone  
source.socialsecuritynumber -\> FormatSSN -\> adamImport.employee.ssn  
  
transformer FormatSSN  
begin  
/[\^0-9]/ "" -\> input  
  
if lengthof input != 9 then return ""  
  
/([0-9]{3})([0-9]{2})([0-9]{4})/ "\$1-\$2-\$3" -\> input  
end

The above imaginary code describes how the data is transformed and moved. There are issues with this idea however that would have to be sorted out. Overall, however, I’m liking the idea, and the syntax.