“I work for a PaaS company” I answered him. “Ah, okay, great”, and he moved to another subject. It was a cold winter day on a hipster cloud conference. He wasn’t the only one that directly knew what my company did. Most people there knew the difference between Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS), and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) and therefore knew exactly what a PaaS company did, right? Well, not exactly… Nowadays, it’s.

Somehow it is a recurring theme in computer science: create a “programming” system that is easier to use and learn than the existing programming approaches. I am not just talking about better tools, like IDEs, but also new languages. It seems as if each self-respecting programmer creates his/her own language or tool-set nowadays, right? Okay, I have to admit that not all efforts are focused on making things easier, often.

May 24th the first Language Workbench Competition have been held in Cambridge (UK) as a warming-up of the Code Generation conference. The idea for a language workbench competition originates from a group of people during Code Generation 2010. A lot of new initiatives in the field of language workbenches are arising to facilitate the creation of Domain Specific Languages (DSLs) and their accompanied code generators and IDEs. They all have.