XML as a Practical Domain-Specific Language in Government Software: Lessons from the IRS Tax Withholding Estimator
By
y1n0
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Summary
The article discusses the author's experience leading the IRS's new open-source Tax Withholding Estimator (TWE) project, using it as a case study to explore XML as a domain-specific language (DSL). The author argues that XML, despite being widely criticized, serves as a 'cheap DSL' - a pragmatic solution for government software projects where resources are limited. The article examines XML's strengths (human-readable, tool support, validation) and weaknesses (verbosity, complexity) in the context of public sector software development, where constraints like budget, legacy systems, and regulatory requirements make XML a practical choice despite its technical shortcomings.
Key quotes
· 5 pulledXML is a cheap DSL. It's not a great DSL, but it's a cheap one.
In government software, you're not building for the future. You're building for the present, with the tools you have, for the people who need it now.
The IRS's new Tax Withholding Estimator is free, open source, and, in a major first for the IRS, open for public contributions.
XML's greatest strength is also its greatest weakness: it's human-readable, but that readability comes at the cost of verbosity.
Public sector software exists in a world of constraints: budget constraints, time constraints, regulatory constraints, and legacy system constraints.
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