My name is Daniel Pelsmaeker, and I just started as a first-year PhD student at the Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands. Here I work with Eelco Visser and his team on the Spoofax Language Workbench and everything related to programming language design, implementation, and formal verification.

The intersection between programming languages and the editors in which users will write them is of particular interest to me. For a language designer to implement support for their language in a particular editor is already a daunting task, often outside of the scope of the language research project. But without editor support it can be difficult to convince users to adopt a new programming language. Therefore, as part of my PhD project, I research how we can get better editor support for our programming languages, while minimizing the effort required.

I got the opportunity to attend the ECOOP 2018 conference as a student volunteer, and I look forward to meeting the hugely diverse people from all over the world. This is my first time being a student volunteer, and it not only allows me to attend, but hopefully brings me in close contact with the various researchers whilst giving me a peek behind the curtain of such an international conference.

I hope to get a broad view of the research related to programming languages, compilers, verification, and user interaction at the main conferences and co-located workshops, but I mostly look forward to the CurryOn and ECOOP talks about particular programming languages, their design and motivations.