language parallax

The previously blogged Czarnecki paper referenced the JunGL project at Oxford.
JunGL is a domain-specific language for refactoring. The ICSE paper describes C# refactorings.
They point out that development environments implementations of refactorings are often quite buggy. I’ve noticed this myself. They’ve compiled a list of such bugs.
They also point out that authoring refactorings […]

I’ve been seeing Krzysztof Czarnecki’s name around for a couple of years, but only recenly started reading his work.
His paper “Framework-Specific Modeling Languages with Round-Trip Engineering” pdf (actually M. Antkiewicz is the first author) is something that caught my eye in particular.
From the “Related Work” section:

Domain-Specific Modeling Languages (DSMLs) and frameworks. The idea […]

While flipping through the latest issue of “Communications of the ACM”, my eye caught a drawing of the Tower of Babel with the names of early programming languages inscribed in the spirals of the tower. It was Figure 1 of an article called “A History of the History of Programming Languages” (also in html) […]

I’ve been wanting to make a point about software development environments, tools, and languages by looking closely at the visitor pattern.
First let’s look at the usual OO way of defining a “Print” method for 2 child expression classes:

abstract class Expr {
abstract void Print(PrintStream out);
}
class IntExpr extends Expr {
int v;
IntExpr(int v) { this.v […]

I just noticed a story about Miscosoft’s Silverlight, IronRuby, and IronPython:

Meanwhile, the Microsoft Silverlight 1.1 CTP was disclosed, said to support JavaScript, C#, VB, Ruby, and Python.
Of note, the company is now supporting the IronPython dynamic language, and it made its first announcement of IronRuby.
“With the IronRuby announcement, even in its current CTP form, we […]

Yesterday I was googling for any references to the HQL ANTLR grammar files. One of the first things that came up was a blog entry by Martin Fowler. I scrolled down a bit and noticed another blog entry about using antlr for dsl’s.
More googling shows that the Fowler/ANTLR connection is not new, but […]