Abstract. Today's challenges for language development include language extension and composition, as well as the use of diverse notations. A promising approach is projectional editing, a technique to directly manipulate the abstract syntax tree of a program, without relying on parsers. Its potential lies in the ability to combine diverse notational styles -such as text, symbols, tables, and graphics -and the support for a wide range of composition techniques. However, projectional editing is often perceived as problematic for developers. Expressed drawbacks include the unfamiliar editing experience and challenges in the integration with existing infrastructure. In this paper we investigate the usability of projectional editors. We systematically identify usability issues resulting from the architecture. We use JetBrains Meta Programming System (MPS) as a case study. The case study discusses the concepts that MPS incorporates to address the identified issues, evaluates effectiveness of these concepts by surveying professional developers, and reports industrial experiences from realizing large-scale systems. Our results show that the benefits of flexible language composition and diverse notations come at the cost of serious usability issues -which, however, can be effectively mitigated with facilities that emulate editing experience of parser-based editors.
We report on an industrial case study on developing the embedded software for a smart meter using the C programming language and domain-specific extensions of C such as components, physical units, state machines, registers and interrupts. We find that the extensions help significantly with managing the complexity of the software. They improve testability mainly by supporting hardware-independent testing, as illustrated by low integration efforts. The extensions also do not incur significant overhead regarding memory consumption and performance. Our case study relies on mbeddr, an extensible version of C. mbeddr, in turn, builds on the MPS language workbench which supports modular extension of languages and IDEs.
We describe two innovations in programming languages: modularity and projectional editing. Language modularity refers to the ability to combine independently developed languages without changing their respective definitions. A language is not anymore a fixed quantity, instead it can be extended with domain-specific constructs as needed. Projectional editing refers to a technique of building editors and IDEs that avoid the need for parsers. They support a wide range of tightly integrated notations including textual, symbolic, tabular and graphical. In addition, by avoiding parsers, the well-known limitations of grammar composition are avoided as well. The article illustrates the consequences of these two innovations for the design of (programming) languages with three examples. First, we discuss a set of modular extensions of C for embedded programming that enables efficient code generation and formal analysis. Second, we discuss a language for requirements engineering that flexibly combines structured and unstructured (prose) data. Third, we illustrate a language for defining insurance rules that makes use of mathematical notations. All examples rely on the open source JetBrains MPS language workbench.
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