Professor Fish

Just arrived in Marburg for Sebastian Erdweg's PhD defense. On this occasion, I will speak about the emerging design of a functional programming class that we will start next semester in Koblenz. It uses and augments the 101companies Project in interesting ways. Regards, Ralf Title: Design of a functional programming class Abstract : In the classic model, the lecturer takes the students through aspects of functional programming (such as list processing, higher-order functions, monads) and provides slides, samples, and other resources to the students, possibly complemented by a textbook recommendation. In the proposed model, a software chrestomathy becomes the primary source of knowledge and center of activity. Relevant programming concepts, language and technology aspects are documented and associated with a rich and organized set of samples including cross-references to external resources such as textbooks, Wikipedia, and other wikis. We are preparing such a course withi...

Dear Skype, thanks for assuring me that you take care of my issue. Great also that you do send this confirmation (see below), in response to the painful support chat you impressively offered. Cleverly, you do not provide any means of updating you on the matter. This is troublesome in so far as I managed to work around the issue and I would prefer to let you know that you please do not change this running system so that I can stop wasting my time on getting the surface working. Anyway, if you run into customers with my issue (such as Microsoft Accounts with confused country/region codes and trouble to merge or unlink skype and microsoft accounts), please get in touch and I might want to do some moonlighting. :-) Thanks, Ralf PS: I do think that the Microsoft Surface RT is pretty impressive, but it looks like the efforts towards identity integration cannot work. In fact, it looks like this platform has amassed so much legacy in terms of identity platforms and constraints and a...

Preamble In this post, I work towards  a vision towards 101companies vNext . The version of the vision is Pre-alpha ; thus the title of this post. I am submitting this post as a position paper to  SL(E)BOK @ SLE2012 . Before I start, I want to make sure to list those individuals who have helped me to arrive at this vision: Jean-Marie Favre, Dragan Gasevic, Martin Leinberger, Thomas Schmorleiz, and Andrei Varanovich. Good news The 101companies community project aims at aggregating and organizing knowledge about software technologies, software languages, and software concepts. The project is getting somewhere in that "interesting" source code is added to the  101repo  continuously and "relevant" technologies, languages, and concepts are added continuously to the 101wiki for the last two years or so. Also, the project starts to "make sense" for teaching and professional education . Further, the project also starts to be "a viable scient...

I am visiting LogicBlox  (and hence, transitively, Predictix ) in Atlanta to re-learn logic programming properly and see what our SLE super-weapons of massive engineering can do for them. Hence, it probably makes sense to give a talk as a kind of  potpourri . Speaker : Ralf Lämmel (University of Koblenz-Landau) Title :  A software language engineer's potpourri  Abstract : In this talk, I present some of our recent research results and interests; they all relate to and, in fact, enhance software language engineering in a broad sense. The first topic is the 101companies project , which is developing into an advanced, structured, linked knowledge resource for software developers. At its heart, 101companies is a software chrestomathy , which illustrates 'many' software languages, technologies, and concepts by implementing a Human Resources Management System 'many' times; each implementation selects from the set of optional features for such a system. The ne...

This is an announcement for a talk at University of Brasilia  on 8 Aug 2012. Title : Rule-based metadata annotation for software repositories Abstract : Take any non-trivial software project; how do we quickly and usefully enough understand what software languages and software technologies are at work in the project; how can we systematically represent very much related knowledge about software concepts or product features exercised in directories, files, or fragments thereof in the project? How can we, in fact, gather architectural understanding on the grounds of "tags" for languages, technologies, concepts, and features; what can we do to visualize, validate, and otherwise leverage such information for the benefit of understanding projects specifically and computer science generally? In this talk, the language 101meta and the technology 101explorer will be described in an effort of responding to the aforementioned challenges; 101meta and 101explorer are grown ...

Tonight,  Henrique Rebêlo will take me to the sea in Recife , which is notoriously known for the occasional shark attack . This means that this could be my last post, and I try to get some stuff done before we go there. This also includes posting the abstract of the talk that I was just giving. There is, in fact, a submitted paper to back up the new content in the talk (such as a rule-based language for metadata association with repository and wiki entities), but I was planning to work a bit more on the paper before I reveal it. Chances are that this will never happen; please contact the co-authors in case necessary. Title :  Understanding a multi-language, multi-technology software chrestomathy Abstract : The 101companies community project implements a human-resources management system time and again while using many different software languages and software technologies. A key challenge of this project is to handle, in fact, to make good use of the divers...

I am visiting  Zinovy Diskin  and  Tom Maibaum at the Department of Computing and Software at McMaster University  to get some work going on patterns of bidirectional transformations (BX), which we started at CSXW 2011 , satellite event at GTTSE 2011 . I am not going to say more, though, about BX here. Instead, I would like to make an announcement of the talk at McMaster. Not too much surprisingly, I am going to speak about megamodeling. As it happens or just in time, the  megamodeling paper  by Jean-Marie Favre, Andrei Varanovich, and me has been accepted for MODELS 2012 .  Title : Megamodeling for software technologies Abstract : The term of megamodeling has arisen specifically in the MDE context as referring to a form of modeling at the macroscopic level such that the model elements in megamodels would be models themselves, e.g., metamodels, conformant models, and transformation models. A more general notion of megamodeling ...