About the SLE Series

Scope of the SLE Conference

The term “software language” comprises all sorts of artificial languages used in software development including general-purpose programming languages, domain-specific languages, modeling and meta-modeling languages, data models, and ontologies. Used in its broadest sense, examples include modeling languages such as UML-based and domain-specific modeling languages, business process modeling languages, and web application modeling languages. The term “software language” also comprises APIs and collections of design patterns that are implicitly defined languages.

Software language engineering is the application of a systematic, disciplined, quantifiable approach to the development, use, and maintenance of these languages. Thus, the SLE conference is concerned with all phases of the lifecycle of software languages; these include the design, implementation, documentation, testing, deployment, evolution, recovery, and retirement of languages. Of special interest are tools, techniques, methods and formalisms that support these activities. In particular, tools are often based on or even automatically generated from a formal description of the language. Hence, of special interest is the treatment of language descriptions as software artifacts, akin to programs - while paying attention to the special status of language descriptions, subject to tailored engineering principles and methods for modularization, refactoring, refinement, composition, versioning, co-evolution, and analysis.