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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Alan Shutko" data-source="post: 3624681" data-attributes="member: 23694">I went that way for a while, and decided it was a really, really bad idea.There are tons and tons of great programming languages out there.  It's usually a much better idea to write a framework in one of them rather than to write your own bad language in XML.  (In general, any language written in XML is bad, and any language you write yourself is bad.  Doing both is quadruply bad.)Here's why:  it's easy to write a dice roller in any programming language around.  Why would someone want to learn your undocumented language to write a dice roller, when they could write one in the language they know?  Or, why write one at all, since you can't swing a cat without hitting five?I'd say, in general, the "totally general" application framework is a bad idea in itself, because honestly, most people don't want to write apps, they want to use them.  And those that do want to write them, generally don't want to learn something new unless it offers them truly great benefits over existing tools.  (For example, how does your framework make it easier to define a skill than doing it in, say, Ruby on Rails?)Not to say the framework idea is terrible.  But it'd probably be much better as a domain-specific language or toolkit on something like VB.net or Ruby.</blockquote>