Software language engineering in the large: towards composing and deriving languages

摘要

Suitable software languages are crucial to tackling the ever-increasing complexity of software engineering processes and software products. They model, specify, and test products, describe processes and interactions with services and serve many other purposes. Meanwhile, engineering suitable modeling languages with useful tooling also has become a challenging endeavor - and far too often, new languages are developed from scratch. We shed light on the advances of modeling language engineering that facilitate reuse, modularity, compositionality, and derivation of new languages based on language components. To this end, we discuss ways to design, combine, and derive modeling languages in all their relevant aspects. We illustrate the application of advanced language engineering throughout the paper, which culminates in the example of deriving complete domain-specific transformations language from existing language components.