Abstract

Domain-specific languages (DSLs) assist a software developer (or end-user) in writing a program using idioms that are similar to the abstractions found in a specific problem domain. Indeed, the enhanced software productivity and reliability benefits that have been reported from DSL usage are hard to ignore and DSLs are flourishing. However, tool support for DSLs is lacking when compared to the capabilities provided for standard General-Purpose Languages (GPLs). For example, support for unit testing of a DSL program, as well as DSL debuggers, are rare. A Systematic Mapping Study (SMS) has been performed to better understand the DSL research field, identify research trends, and any possible open issues. In this talk I will first introduce DSLs by discussing when and how to develop DSLs, then results from SMS will be presented along with DSL examples.

Short Bio

Marjan Mernik received the M.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees in computer science from the University of Maribor in 1994 and 1998 respectively. He is currently a professor at the University of Maribor, Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. He is also a visiting professor at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, Department of Computer and Information Sciences, and at the University of Novi Sad, Faculty of Technical Sciences. His research interests include programming languages, compilers, domain-specific (modeling) languages, grammar-based systems, grammatical inference, and evolutionary computations. He is a member of the IEEE, ACM and EAPLS. Dr. Mernik is the Editor-In-Chief of Computer Languages, Systems and Structures journal, as well as Associate Editor of Applied Soft Computing journal.