Experiences with Teaching MPS in Industry: Towards Bringing Domain Specific Languages Closer to Practitioners

Abstract

Domain specific languages (DSLs) bring substantial increase in productivity and quality and thus look very appealing to software engineering practitioners. Because language workbenches can drastically reduce the cost of building and maintaining DSLs and associated tooling, they catch the attention of technical leads and project managers in the industry. Effective use of language engineering technologies for software development requires specific knowledge about building DSLs in general and about language workbenches in particular. Practicing software engineers need to enrich their skills with a new software development approach and the supporting tools. In this paper we present our experiences with training and coaching software practitioners in developing domain specific languages and the associated tooling with Jetbrains' Meta-Programming System. We distill the experience that we have gained over the last three years while running 16 trainings organized by three different organizations. The trainings were attended by over 50 developers, who work in different business domains and posses a wide variety of technical backgrounds, previous experiences and concrete needs. We present a set of challenges faced while teaching language engineering technologies in the industry. To address these challenges we developed a curriculum containing increasingly complex topics and an approach, which combines classical trainings with continuous coaching either remotely or on site. Based on our experience we distill a set of lessons learnt about the dissemination of language engineering technologies to practitioners. We identify several concrete needs which are key to broader adoption of language engineering in practice.