CodeGeneration 2009 - a great conference

I spent the last three days at the CodeGeneration2009 conference. I knew it would be good, since it was good the last two years, but this year it was really great.

The good thing is that it really serves as a (european) community meeting for many folks involved in DSLs, MDD and code generation. The best part of the conference, hence, is meeting all the colleagues and friens in this space.

Also, this was the first conference in a long time where I spend almost every slot in a session: I was in Eelco Visser's Stratego/XT tutorial, in a panel or two, and in two goldfishbowls (I love the format!) about the relationship between DSLs and programming languages, and modeling vs. programming in general.

I had the pleasure of keynoting the event this year, together with Metacase's Steve Kelly. We never did a talk together, but I think our two co-presented keynotes on best and worst practices in DSLs and MDD went really well - at least that's what the audience feedback sounded like.

The talk on MPS with Konstantin Solomatov was also a great success. I started out by presenting a bunch of slides about the idea of programming == modeling and projectional editing, and then Konstanting gave an impressive demo of MPS. You could see a bunch of open mouths in the audience while he was showing off the tool (people told me that mine was also open :-)). After he finished his demo with the words "I think that's all I wanted to show" the audience spontaneously applauded.

I think tools like MPS and Intentional's Domain Workbench have a great future - even if currently they still have a couple of rough edges. Who cares if you have to wait another year for a revolution :-) ?

So, I guess, you should really consider going to Code Gen 2010 next year if you're into DSLs. Not the usual introductory stuff - really interesting content!

Thanks Mark Dalgarno!  permalink