Colm is new a programming language designed for the analysis and transformation of computer languages. Colm's main contribution lies in the parsing method. Colm was designed by Adrian Thurston, as part of his Ph.D. work.
In the beginning of last year, Ehud Lamm launched on Lamba the Ultimate a thread about programming languages predictions for 2008. Several subjects popped up: concurrency, functional programming, future of Java, Ruby, C++, and many others… What really happened in 2008 and what are the prospects for 2009? Bloggers have addressed these questions on demand of James Iry, echoing at last year thread.
Meta Programming System (MPS), a new Language Oriented Programming tool from JetBrains, allows the developers to extend programming languages as well as create Domain Specific Languages (DSLs) for enterprise applications. JetBrains development team recently announced the release of beta version of MPS software.
Martin Fowler unveiled some details about his upcoming book on DSLs through his Work In Progress gateway. In the draft of its introductory part, Fowler gives an example of a Domain Specific Language case and provides some new insights on DSLs, their implementation and use.
Inconsistencies between the user interface and user’s expectations can be an important source of bugs. According to Leonardo Vernazza, this is due the fact that the user and the UI do not talk the same language. Using a DSL, characterized by a high abstraction level, would be instrumental for avoiding the risk of translation errors and would therefore reduce the testing burden.
At a recent conference, Martin Fowler and Neal Ford develop the concept of language-oriented programming and question the eventuality for Domain Specific Languages to become a new abstraction and modelling mechanism. This could be "the next evolutionary step beyond object-oriented programming", especially since major vendors start offering IDE tooling for DSLs.
