Language Design with Intent

Software languages have always been an essential component of model-driven engineering. Their importance and popularity has been on the rise thanks to language workbenches, language-oriented development and other methodologies that enable us to quickly and easily create new languages specific for each domain. Unfortunately, language design is largely a form of art and has resisted most attempts to turn it into a form of science or engineering. In this paper we borrow concepts, techniques and principles from the domain of persuasive technology, or wider yet, design with intent – which was developed as a way to influence users behaviour for social and environmental benefit. Similarly, we claim, software language designers can make conscious choices in order to influence the behaviour of language users. The paper describes a process of extracting design components from 24 books of eight categories (dragon books, parsing techniques, compiler construction, compiler design, language implementation, language documentation, programming languages, software languages), as well as from the original set of Design with Intent cards and papers on DSL design. The resulting language design card toolkit can be used by DSL designers to cover important design decisions and make them with more confidence.