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Teaching MPS: Experiences from Industry and Academia

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Domain-Specific Languages in Practice

Abstract

In this chapter, we present our experience on teaching MPS to industry professionals and university students. JetBrains has run its commercial courses on MPS both online and on-site for 19 different customers coming from 12 countries over the past 5 years, for some repetitively. The participants typically started the courses with no or little language engineering background and no experience with MPS. Although language design with MPS was the main objective of the courses, some general language engineering topics were also covered, and motivation into the domain was provided. We also report our teaching experience of a course on the implementation of domain-specific languages (DSL), given at universities in Finland, Norway, and Canada. The course, aimed at a broad audience of computer science students, covers DSL design principles and implementation techniques using three text-based language workbenches (Eclipse Xtext, Spoofax, Rascal MPL), prior to introducing MPS. By the time MPS is discussed, students have an understanding of what language implementation comprises of and are somewhat fluent in language engineering terminology. This enabled us to focus on language implementation techniques that are distinctive in MPS. We discuss in this chapter the experience we gained during these courses and the evolution of the educational approach.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Bergen Language Design Laboratory, University of Bergen, Bergen, Norway

    Mikhail Barash

  2. JetBrains s.r.o., Praha, Czech Republic

    Václav Pech

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  1. Mikhail Barash
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  2. Václav Pech
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Correspondence to Mikhail Barash .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Fondazione Bruno Kessler (FBK) - MoDiS, Trento, Italy

    Antonio Bucchiarone

  2. School of Innovation, Design and Engineering (IDT), Mälardalen University, Västerås, Sweden

    Antonio Cicchetti

  3. School of Innovation, Design and Engineering (IDT), Mälardalen University, Västerås, Sweden

    Federico Ciccozzi

  4. University of L’Aquila, L’Aquila, Italy

    Alfonso Pierantonio

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Barash, M., Pech, V. (2021). Teaching MPS: Experiences from Industry and Academia. In: Bucchiarone, A., Cicchetti, A., Ciccozzi, F., Pierantonio, A. (eds) Domain-Specific Languages in Practice. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-73758-0_10

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-73758-0_10

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-030-73757-3

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-030-73758-0

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