Call for Papers
The 1st International Conference on Software Language Engineering (SLE) is devoted to topics related to artificial languages in software engineering. SLE’s foremost mission is to encourage and organize communication between communities that have traditionally looked at software languages from different, more specialized, and yet complementary perspectives. SLE emphasizes the fundamental notion of languages as opposed to any realization in specific “technical spaces”.
Scope
The term “software language” comprises all sorts of artificial languages used in software development including general purpose programming languages, domain-specific languages, modeling and meta- modeling languages, data models, and ontologies. We use this term in its broadest sense. Thus, for example, modeling languages include UML and UML-based languages, synchronous languages used in safety critical applications, business process modeling languages, and web application modeling languages, to name a few. Perhaps less obviously, the term “software language” also comprises APIs and collections of design patterns that are indeed implicitly defined languages.
Software language engineering is the application of a systematic, disciplined, quantifiable approach to the development, use, and maintenance of these languages. Thus, the SLE conference is concerned with all phases of the lifecycle of software languages; these include the design, implementation, documentation, testing, deployment, evolution, recovery, and retirement of languages. Of special interest are tools, techniques, methods and formalisms that support these activities. In particular, tools are often based on or even automatically generated from a formal description of the language. Hence, of special interest is the treatment of language descriptions as software artifacts, akin to programs - while paying attention to the special status of language descriptions, subject to tailored engineering principles and methods for modularization, refactoring, refinement, composition, versioning, co- evolution, and analysis.
Themes and Topics
We solicit high-quality contributions in the area of SLE ranging from theoretical and conceptual contributions to tools, techniques and frameworks that support the aforementioned lifecycle activities. Some examples of tools, techniques, applications, and problems are listed below in order to clarify the types of contributions sought by SLE.
- Formalisms used in designing and specifying languages and tools that analyze such language descriptions
- Language implementation tools and techniques
- Program and model transformation tools
- Composition, integration, and mapping tools for managing different aspects of software languages or different manifestations of a given language
- Language evolution
- Approaches to elicitation, specification, and verification of requirements for software languages
- Language development frameworks, methodologies, techniques, best practices, and tools for the broader language lifecycle covering phases such as analysis, testing, and documentation.
- Design challenges in SLE
- Applications of languages including innovative domain-specific languages or “little” languages
Do note that this list is not exclusive and many examples of tools, techniques, approaches have not been listed. The program committee chairs encourage potential contributors to contact them with questions about the scope and topics of interest to SLE.
Submission Guidelines and Publishing
Submitted articles must not have been previously published or currently be submitted elsewhere. All submitted papers will be closely reviewed by at least three members of the program committee. All accepted papers will be made available at the conference in the pre-proceedings and published in the post-proceedings of the conference, which will appear in Springer’s Lecture Notes in Computer Science series. Authors will have the opportunity to revise their accepted paper for the pre and post- proceedings.