Level Up 7: Understands DSLs, how to create them, and their limitations

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1. Explain why DSLs are an advantage to a language like ruby.

DSLs are by their nature a very expressive and highly readable language that extends Ruby's own expressiveness to a higher level. DSLs not only make a specific task easier, but also make the code clearer. Ruby also lends itself to DSL development because its extensive use of syntactic sugar, including the following language features:

- optional parentheses
- symbols (they are less noisy than strings)
- blocks (enable delayed execution of code)
- literal arrays and hashes
- variable-length arguments
- modules (provide a clean separation of code)
- splats (handle parameter arrays)
- eval, instance_eval, and class_eval methods
- define_method and alias_method

In summary, DSLs provide a clear, readable and flexible interface for performing a specific job.

2. Give two examples of DSLs that we use on an everyday basis in rails development

RSpec, Rake, ActiveRecord Models, Capistrano and routes.rb are some of the most prominent examples of DSLs in Rails development.