Intentional and Me

Starting November 1, 2007, I will work as a "Senior Independent Consultant" for Intentional Software. I will stay independent and also work with other customers, but the majority of my work will be for Intentional. I will also continue my involvement with openArchitectureWare. Note that when I will talk, present or write publicly, I will always make clear whether I am acting in my role related to Intentional, or simply as myself :-)

As I had already pointed out in previous posts, I think that their technology supports a qualitatively better way for building domain-specific languages. Actually, their Intentional Domain Workbench is one of the first incarnations of what Martin Fowler calls a Language Workbench. I am really looking forward to working with the technology and the team!  permalink    1 comments

 

OOPSLA Recordings for SE Radio

Of course I also used OOPSLA to capture a bunch of interviews for the SE Radio podcast. Here's what I recorded: Galen Hunt on Singularity, Olaf Zimmermann on Webservices, Dick Gabriel on Lisp, as well as Erich Gamma and Dave Thomas (OTI-Dave). So you can expect good stuff to appear on SE Radio over the winter :-)  permalink    1 comments

 

Reasons to go to OOPSLA

In case you've ever considered going to OOPSLA, here are a couple of reasons that make it somewhat special compared to other conferences. For example, ...

... there were keynotes by various "old guys" such as Dave Parnas (architecture guru), Freed Brooks ("No Silver Bullet") and John McCarthy (Lisp). Not all of those
presentations were necessarily exciting and enlightening, but seeing these folks talk
is certainly a treat you'll only get at OOPSLA.

... I was sitting in the bar one evening listening in to a discussion about programming language concepts. What made this conversation special was the fact that the people discussing were Anders Hejlsberg (Turbo Pascal, Delphi, C#), Eric Meijer (LINQ, and general "language pimper"), Martin Odersky (Scala) and Dave Thomas (an old Smalltalk guy).

... there was a really extremely cool eveining keynote by Guy Steele and Dick Gabriel. The keynote was basically about interesting features in various historical programming languages. What made this talk stand out, however, was the fact that it was almost like a theater: superbly prepared slides, music and poems (and this really nice Lisp song :-)). Dick and Guy didn't talk -- they recited their prepared script. At one point, Guy actually did some rap thing about a programming language :-) This was really different, absolutely great and the first talk on a tech conference, where the audience actually stood up at the end to applaud!

So, maybe you will consider going to OOPSLA next year :-) ?  permalink    0 comments

 

AMPLE Videos

In case you've always wanted to know (but never got the chance to ask :-)) what I am up to in the AMPLE research project, here's a bunch of videos of the stuff I did together with Christa Schwanninger and Iris Groher.

If you are interested in a more systematic tutorial of the openArchitectureWare features in that context, please look at these screencasts.

Labels: eclipse, openarchitectureware

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OOPSLA III: Tutorial Slides Online

The slides for my tutorials are now available online: Software Architecture Documentation in the Real World, Writing Adaptable Software, Best Practices for Model-Driven Development  permalink    0 comments

 

OOPSLA II: Monday

This moring I ran my tutorial on Software Architecture Documentation. Although Documentation is an inherently unsexy topic, I had about 40 participants and I think it was fun for everybody. Yesterday I already ran my tutorial on Best Practices for MDSD, I had about 45 participants, and feedback was really good. Today I spent the rest of the day in the DSM workshop. It was much more interesting today, since we've actually had discussions as opposed to paper presentations.  permalink    0 comments

 

OOPSLA I: DSM Workshop 2007

I am currently in the Domain Specific Modeling 2007 workshop at the OOPSLA 2007 conference. Their are so many papers that the organizers had to make it a two-day workshop. Good sign for the whole MDD/DSL/DSM trend!

I am once again a little bit frustrated by the way universities work - they seem not to care what happens in the rest of the world (I had blogged about this last year) and are happy to reinvent wheels over and over again :-( Some event invent their own (really bad!) notation for showing concepts and their relationships, as opposed to using well-known notations (for example, UML class diagrams).

Otherwise it's very nice here. It's my first OOPSLA without a jet lag, since I had already spend a week in Seattle.  permalink    0 comments

 

API vs. DSLs

The discussion of what is the difference between an (internal) DSL and an API comes up over and over again.

So, what is it that distinguishes a DSL from a (really well designed) API? Is it method chaining ("fluent APIs")? Is it the fact that the API/DSL is readable by a domain expert?

In my view, the two important differences are:

(1) domain-specific syntax: the syntax does not look like a 3GL program. It might be a completeley different syntax in an external DSL or syntax "tweaks" in an internal DSL that make it look sufficiently different than typical host language code

(2) domain-specific validation: if something's wrong in your "DSL program" I want error messages on the same level of abstraction as the program (which is: domain-specific) as opposed to strange compiler or runtime errors (because you somehow misused a weird host language feature)

I am not sure these two points are good enough to distinguish things. What do you think?  permalink    6 comments

 

Metaprogramming Approaches compared

I was recently thinking about different approaches of meta programming. Specifically, I was comparing the approach taken by converge, and the one taken by Ruby. Of course, the primary difference is that Converge is compile-time, whereas Ruby is runtime meta programming. But there's another difference:

In Converge,
the process works as follows: the parser reads your DSL-specific code into a parse tree based on a custom grammar. Then you as the meta programmer get a chance to process that parse tree - and what you'll typically do is to transform it into a regular converge AST. To make that simple, Converge provides macro facilities.

In Ruby things work completely differently. You (mis)use all kinds of more or less obvious language features to somehow make your own DSL be valid Ruby code. As a consequence, the meta program often looks awkward, it is not easily understandable what happens. Also, you cannot use *any* syntax you want - because it has to be valid Ruby syntax.

I really think the approach taken by Converge is cleaner - since you have one clear transformation step, as opposed to using all kinds of eval, block and other trickery. It would be interesing to use it in a dynamic environment.

Any opinions?  permalink    5 comments

 

Video Interview on Languages

Here's a (german) video interview that was filmed at the JAX 2007 conference by the JAX team. It is about Scala and current trends in languages. I tried hard not to speak too Swabian :-)



Link: sevenload.com

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BigModels workshop

Today at the Eclipse Summit Europe there was another workshop called "BigModels". The idea was to discuss the challenges in building model management solutions for really big models in the enterprise -- particularly with EMF.

As yesterday I again point to Ed Merks' post on this topic. I figure it's pointless to blog about the same topics as Ed, since he's a much better story teller than I am :-)  permalink    0 comments

 

Eclipse Modeling Symposium

Yesterday there was the 2007 edition of the Modeling Symposium, where I served as the chair and moderator. It is interesting to see that there's really quite a lot of innovation going on. If you want to read more, please refer to Ed Merks' Blog Entry about the event :-)  permalink    0 comments

 

Language War

I have always been interested in programming languages in general, and I have read books about quite a large variety (no, I am not saying that I am a professional in using those languages, just that I think I have a good overview). Recently, the interest in languages and language features (as opposed to bloated frameworks) has increased in the mainstream. Examples of somewhat advanced languages (compared to Java :-)) are Ruby, Scala, C# 3 (to some extent), Erlang (wrt. to concurrency) and of course the whole DSL movement.

I am currently writing a (german :-() article on that topic that I will post sometime in the future, but if you really want to get a good (and funny) impression of what it's all about, read The Last Language War / Language Trolling Post You'll Ever Need To Read (Hopefully) :-)  permalink    0 comments