WG211/M6JuliaLawall

What are the important research issues in domain-specific languages?

Julia Lawall

Many of us have developed, used, or desired domain-specific languages (DSLs) in a variety of problem areas. Furthermore, the working group will be co-organizing a DSLWC next year and a [workshop on DSLs] will be co-located with GPCE 2008. The goal of this discussion is to consider what are problems that we as a community should be working on in this area. Some issues that could be considered are:

• If you were teaching a course on DSL's, what would you put in it?

• If you had a new PhD student who was interested in DSLs, what literature would you point him to?

• What topics would you hope to hear about at the DSL conference?

• What kinds of industrial collaborations are possible in this area, and how would such collaborations make a research contribution?

• How much can DSL design and development be automated?

• What tools could we envision to develop DSLs? What are the benefits and shortcomings of existing tools, such as DSLTools, JastAdd, and Stratego

• What are the killer apps for DSLs? Does the question make sense?

• What is the relationship between DSLs and modeling languages?

• Which metrics could be used to evaluate the benefits of a DSL for a given application domain.

• Does the syntax of a DSL really matter? Is XML, as eg used in a configuration file, a DSL?

(some questions contributed by Charles Consel and Laurent Reveillere)