Programming language design requires many iterations to get right. Building the tools to use and evaluate a design is an important cost factor. In this talk I discuss and demonstrate the Spoofax language workbench, its high-level declarative meta-languages for the definition of syntax and semantics of programming languages, and the live generation of programming environments from those definitions.

Eelco Visser is Antoni van Leeuwenhoek Professor of Computer Science at Delft University of Technology. He received a master’s and doctorate in computer science from the University of Amsterdam in 1993 and 1997, respectively. Previously he served as postdoc at the Oregon Graduate Institute, as Assistant Professor at Utrecht University, and as Associate Professor at TU Delft.

His research interests include programming languages, software language engineering, domain-specific programming languages, program transformation, software security, and interaction design. With his students he has designed and implemented the Spoofax language workbench, as well as many domain-specific languages, including DSLs for syntax definition (SDF), program transformation (Stratego), software deployment (Nix), web application development (WebDSL), and mobile phone applications (mobl). He is the lead developer of the researchr bibliography management system and the WebLab learning management system.