Program Transformation & Generation

February 05, 2008

Today I started teaching a new master’s course on Program Transformation & Generation at Delft University. The course studies techniques principles, techniques, applications of program transformation and generation. Using WebDSL as case study, several paradigms for implementing domain-specific languages will be studied, including term rewriting (Stratego), attribute grammars (Eli, JastAdd), and graph transformation. This is a departure from earlier courses I taught at Utrecht University about same subject. There I would spend a full quarter teaching on just Stratego/XT, which I felt was necessary to prepare master’s students for a master project in this area. With the current state of documentation of Stratego/XT, it appears that such a in depth course is no longer necessary. At least, that is the experience with several (PhD) students who recently started developing Stratego applications succesfully without any prior training.