language parallax

I had thought to stop by EclipseCon ‘07 last week in Santa Clara on Wednesday, but the single-day fee was a little steep considering I was really only interested in attending one 50-minute talk that I had seen a portion of at OOPSLA. That talk was the demo of IBM’s SAFARI “meta-tooling platform”.

A few links:

The 2 page paper from the OOPSLA ‘06 demo
The EclipseCon ‘07 page about the SAFARI talk
The 3 page paper about that talk

The main take-home point for me is that this is the only project in this space that is going to be open source anytime soon. It’s way beyond the scope of anything I could reasonably expect to pull off. And as mentioned in the previous post, these kinds of things are “all or nothing”. There are so many intertwined aspects that it really takes a large, focused team to create usable software.

So when is it going to be open source? Where’s the placeholder web page? Hopefully we’ll see more soon. If anyone out there runs across this and has information, please shoot me a note at my gmail.com address (pingel).