Domain-specific engineering of domain-specific languages

Domain-specific modelling (DSM) enables experts of arbitrary domains to perform modelling tasks using familiar constructs. This contrasts with common code-centric development approaches where programmers deal with object-oriented approximations of higher level concepts. Domain-specific concepts and their relationships are captured by domain-specific languages (DSLs). Unfortunately, it is common practice for DSLs to be specified within the object-oriented mindsets of classes and associations. This approach not only contradicts the model-driven engineering (MDE) philosophy of development using domain-specific concepts -- in this case, the domain and concepts of DSLs --, it is also faced with the same obstacle as past UML-to-code generation efforts; namely, that UML models are too generic to enable complete program synthesis. In the context of DSL engineering, this obstacle translates to the necessity for DSL designers to explicitly define DSL semantics manually (e.g., via coded generators and/or model transformations). In this work, we propose a novel approach to DSL design where low level modelling formalisms are seamlessly woven together to form new DSLs whose semantics are fully automatically generated.