For over 20 years, the Software Language Engineering community has pushed languages forward. More expressive. More formal. Better tooled. Metamodeling frameworks, transformations, graphical and textual notations, language workbenches. At Obeo, we have contributed to this journey through the Eclipse ecosystem with technologies such as EMF, Acceleo, Sirius, and Capella, deployed in large-scale industrial contexts.

And it worked. Technically.

But when these languages meet real organizations, a different reality emerges. Adoption is hard. Collaboration is harder. Usability becomes the bottleneck. In practice, we have too often confused expressivity with usability.

This keynote reflects on two decades of building and deploying modeling languages in the real world. The conclusion is simple. The problem was never language itself. It was everything around it: user experience, integration into workflows, and the ability for teams to share and evolve a language over time.

The shift to web-based platforms such as Sirius Web and SysON changes the game. Not just new technology. A new constraint. Languages must be collaborative. Accessible. Alive. No longer reserved for experts.

The future of modeling is not less language. It is more language - better tooled, more collaborative, and closer to the people who need it.

Cédric Brun is the CEO of Obeo, a company he first joined as an intern and has since helped grow into an international player in model-driven engineering. Throughout his career, he has focused on advancing modeling technologies to support the design, understanding, and evolution of complex systems in industrial contexts.

Active in the Eclipse community since 2006, he has contributed in multiple roles, including committer, project lead, and mentor. He notably led the creation of Eclipse Sirius, a widely adopted open-source framework that enables the development of domain-specific modeling tools used by engineers and researchers worldwide.

His work spans aerospace, defense, transportation, and other mission-critical domains, helping bridge academic advances in software language engineering with real-world adoption at scale. Today, his focus is on the next generation of modeling platforms, bringing languages closer to users through web-based, collaborative environments.