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Showing posts from September, 2010

Dealing comfortably with the confusion of tongues

That's the title of my invited talk at CHOOSE Forum 2010 . See the abstract below. I just realized that I am going to meet some esteemed colleagues there: Jean Bezivin, Jean-Marie Favre, Uwe Zdun. Talk announcement : http://choose.s-i.ch/events/forum2010/laemmel Abstract : Yahweh brought the confusion of tongues upon the people in the plain of Shinar because he did not like their efforts of building the Tower of Babel with its top in the heavens. In IT, we brought the confusion of tongues upon ourselves with the continuous aggregation of ideas for programming (languages), modeling (languages), domain concepts and domain-specific languages, design patterns, APIs, and so on. All this diversity makes a nontrivial software system look like the Tower of Babel—in terms of the involved complexity. That is, a nontrivial software system involves multiple technical spaces, technologies, bridges between them, and harmful amounts of software asbestos. How can IT personnel acquire the relevant

(Mega)modeling Software Language Artifacts

GPCE/SLE 2010 tutorial Jean-Marie Favre (OneTree Technologies, Luxembourg) Dragan Gašševic (Athabasca University, Canada) Ralf Lämmel (University of Koblenz, Germany) Description Modern software is typically made of heterogeneous sets of software artifacts including for instance databases, programs, transformations, grammars, models and metamodels, compilers, interpreters, formats, ontologies, frameworks, APIs, schemas, configuration files, makefiles, etc. In practice particular languages, tools, implementations, and standards are used such as SQL DDL, Saxon, XLST, Java, Hibernate, XSD, OWL, DOM, Antlr, UML, XMI, Ecore, Awk, and so on. In the absence of a conceptual framework it is difficult to understand the relationships between these software artifacts, if any. The goal of this tutorial is to provide such a framework, showing that the similarity and relationships between techniques can be modeled at a high level of abstraction, and even more importantly that recurring patterns occur

The essence of "The essence of functional programming"

Code for all my Channel9 videos is now hosted  here . If "code is the essence", then this blog post is concerned with the essence of "The essence of functional programming" --- because the post matches a code distribution that is derived from P. Wadler's paper of just that title. The code distribution has two branches: " origin " --- where it indeed stays close to the original code of the paper, and " overhaul " --- where it uses the Haskell's monad/monad transformer library to show some of the examples in modern style. This code has been initially prepared for a Channel9 lecture about monads. The code is available through the SourceForge project developers ; browse the code here ; see the slide deck for the Channel9 lecture here . Here is a more complete reference to Wadler's paper: P. Wadler: The essence of functional programming http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/143165.143169 POPL 1992 Henceforth, we refer to thi

Bulk mailing for your conferences not appreciated

Dear Dr. Nagib Callaos, For some years now, my mailbox is flooded by CFPs for your many conferences such as WMSCI 2011 (for which you are General Chair etc.). My email address is rlaemmel@gmail.com. Please remove me from your bulk mailing system. (I have tried your instructions for unsubscribing in the past, obviously, w/o success.) Keep up the good work . Thanks, Ralf Lämmel PS: It is not easy to set up a mail filter that addresses this problem reliably over the years. Or does anyone have an idea as to how to stretch gmail's filter mechanism? I can think of a rule that checks whether a) we face a CFP or some other form of conference ad, and b) certain keywords (names) occur on the website of the conference. Now, gmail, please provide us with that expressiveness :-)