This Tuesday, December 13, 2011, Lennart Kats defends his doctoral dissertation titled “Building Blocks for Language Workbenches” in the Aula of TU Delft. Quoting the introduction:
This dissertation presents research on techniques, methods, and tool support for domain-specific language engineering. Domain-specific language engineering is the discipline of designing, developing, and maintaining domain-specific programming languages. The focus of this thesis is the architecture of language workbenches their underlying technologies. Language workbenches are tools that make language engineering more efficient by providing an integrated development environment for language engineering tasks. In particular, we introduce the Spoofax language workbench, and describe its techniques for high-level, portable language definitions, language composition, interactive support for defining languages, and language testing.
Prior to the defense the TU Delft Software Engineering Research Group organizes a symposium on software language design and engineering featuring talks by Peter Mosses, Oscar Nierstrasz, and Paul Klint.