Language Workbench Challenge 2012

Apologies for the radio silence: it’s been way too long since I’ve done some blogging.

In my defense, the last couple of months have been pretty busy: I’ve been working a lot on my language workbench (my own startup) and I also got heavily involved with another startup. Last week I was in Cambridge, UK for the Code Generation 2012 conference and the co-located Language Workbench Challenge during which I presented said language workbench for the first time – more on that in a minute.

As it turns out, the next couple of months are going to be slightly less busy and should allow me to write some more blogs. I got some material pent up already that’s good to go after a little spit-shine.

By the way: I was thrilled to notice that views have not really dropped all that much during the hiatus since my last blog post! 🙂

The #lwc2012 is an event that co-located with the Code Generation conference and takes places a day before that. The essence of the #lwc2012 -at least: to me- is to challenge the various language workbench creators with new ideas, levels of maturity, etc.. The sheer variance among the “contenders” is so big that it’s quite impossible to judge them on any objective and/or quantitative scale – this explains why the nomer Competition would be quite unjust. For more information on the event itself, I’m going to refer to the official site. This will probably be updated soon by organizers Angelo Hulshout and Paul Zenden with a nice summary of the event and possibly even videos of the various presentations (including mine).

My primary goal was to gather feedback on my ideas around and implementation of Más which a Cloud-based domain language workbench that makes creation of domain-specific languages and using these to model “stuff”. The feedback I got during the challenge was quite positive, in general. I already knew that UI and the editing behavior still leaves much to be desired but I was positively surprised by the fact that people other than myself were able to use it to do parts of the extension assignment. The fact that you can do graphical modeling with nothing more than regular HTML, CSS, Javascript plus a bit of HTML5 Canvas seemed to surprise plenty of people.

On the whole, the assignment -creating a modeling environment for the Piping & Instrumentation domain, including code generation and preferably doing or triggering simulation- itself was somewhat cumbersome for several reasons.

First of all, the reference implementation made use of a rather old-fashioned piece of proprietary Windows software which didn’t really provide a very clear for the code generation and triggering of the simulation. To get around that, I simply took the MetaEdit+ implementation which the nice people of MetaCase were good enough to share with the world at large, ran their code generation against an equivalent model and re-implemented that. I didn’t bother with the Windows thing beyond that.

Secondly, the two “domain experts” (or at least, the two people most knowledgeable on the domain, being Paul Zenden and Juha-Pekka Tolvanen) on site were also two challengers. Especially the extension assignment could have benefited from a clarification by unbiased domain stakeholders. Angelo and I have already exchanged some ideas on how to do that differently next year – in particular: it would be nice to be able to consult real, on-site domain stakeholders which would be available during the preparation of the assignment as well. The extension assignment also didn’t really address the workbenches’ capability to really extend the language.

Overall, the event was quite inspiring to me and has provided me with encouragement to continue with the development of Más as well as with a couple of ideas I didn’t have beforehand. Stay tuned for more on that in the future 🙂