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U-/M-Languages

Stefan Tilkov,

I only just came across this posting from Jean Bézivin:

Departing from the apparent comfort of huge, unprecise and difficult to specialize monolithic languages like UML 2.0, lead us to the apparent creative and productive environment of multiple coordinated languages. It is quite easy to see what could be achieved with the help of small, well focused and precise DSLs. However we have still many problems beyond of us to solve. The big challenge is how to cope with the fragmentation problem, i.e. the co-existence of hundreds or even thousands of these DSLs. For the time being we have only two ways of coping with this: the existence of a well founded M3-level metalanguage (i.e. the MOF) and the possible forthcoming QVT standard for model transformation language, in the case that this effort finally produces a satisfactory and realistic proposal in 2005 (still to be proved). However, even with a very precise metametamodel and a very well designed model transformation language, we we still have a long way to go before demonstrating the practicality of the approach.

I’m deeply skeptical about the outcome of the QVT efforts, but we will see …