Domain Specific Languages, and Beyond
Host: Markus Völter, Independent Consultant
Languages in various disguises continue to be the primary mechanism for describing what programs should do. The very nature of our means to express the behavior of programs are essential to being effective in programming software, because the nature of a programming language guides, propells and constrains our thinking about the programs being written.
We all know general-purpose languages such as Java, C# or C++. We have also all had contact with domain-specific languages (DSLs) such as SQL, suitable for the domain of working with relational data.More recently, the focus of DSLs is shifting to have companies or projects building their own DSLs for their particular problems at hand, promising greatly improved productivity through better alignment with the problem domain. To enable the construction of such DSL, sophisticated tooling (sometimes called Language Workbenches) is necessary that is now beginning to become available from vendors such as Microsoft or IBM as well as from many smaller companies and open source initiatives.
This track covers a broad range of topics in this area. This includes tools to build your own DSLs, ideas about how the notion of DSLs influences programming language development, and how you can use all this to be more effective in the problems you face every day.
