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[Casey Ransberger]

I was sitting next to a person who was wearing so much perfume that I sneezed and accidentally hit send. 

(I have allergies)

What I was trying to say was that both PetitParser and OMeta are worth having around. OMeta gives you a grammar description that's a bit more concise that what you get out of PetitParser, but it also burdens the learner with a newish language, whereas PetitParser does more or less the same job using only cleverness around building a DSL within the context of pure Smalltalk. 

It's been reported [citation needed] that PetitParser outperforms OMeta. So that's an advantage. It fits with the "everything is Smalltalk" idea.

OMeta, though, seems to express the grammatical transformations in far less code than the PetitParser equivalent, because it is its own language, tailored to the actual problem. 

Personal experience:

With PetitParser, I had to write a ton of different methods to express grammars I was interested in. But they were always very short, in classic Smalltalk style. 

With OMeta, I could do the same thing in a page of cogent, all in your face code. 

Which is the greater cognitive advantage in language design?

Where is the balance between Smalltalk-style versus this totally new thing?

Our current languages, I'll suggest, are still found wanting, for some jobs. The beauty of Smalltalk is we can do everything in one language. But what if we came up with a new language, maybe something like an APL for the graphics pipeline? (Nile/Jezira)

I'm not going to pretend to answer, but providing both strategies as extensions to a minimal, well understood system could be really useful. We might actually learn something in the compare and contrast session. 

It can't possibly hurt?

Blah blah blah,

--C