OOPSLE 2025

OOPSLE – Workshop on Open and Original Problems in Software Language Engineering

The OOPSLE workshop is a discussion-oriented and collaborative forum for formulating and addressing with open, unsolved and unsolvable problems in software language engineering. It can help you define your problems or verify them on the early stage with the community.

“Software languages” comprise all kinds of artificial languages used in software development: for programming, markup, pretty-printing, modelling, data description, formal specification, evolution, etc. Software language engineering is a relatively new research domain of systematic, disciplined and measurable approaches of development, evolution and maintenance of such languages.

The OOPSLE workshop has successfully ran in 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016 and 2020. We are looking forward to the 2025 edition!

Call for Papers

The OOPSLE workshop is a discussion-oriented and collaborative forum for formulating and addressing open, unsolved and unsolvable problems in software language engineering.

We acknowledge the following list as non-exhaustive collection of examples of topics of interests of the workshop:

• Defining an unsolved problem.
• Identifying insufficiently studied problem areas.
• Engaging in technological space travel.
• Generalising and reformulating of well-known problems into an open challenge.
• Assessment and comparison of solutions to an unsolvable problem.
• Defining terms commonly used in various senses.
• Presenting unconventional crossovers of popular research topics.
• Making an overview of major problems hindering solution of a standing challenge
• Designing open datasets and the way we could share and incorporate them.
• Describing novel ideas which are problematic to validate.
• Revealing solid negative results, failed experiments and disproven hypotheses.
• Constructing future community experiments and competitions.
• Critically reassessing a problem that is widely assumed to be solved.

Thanks to the contributions and discussions of the first five editions of OOPSLE, the list of open problems is also gaining a more concrete form. The following issues have been repeatedly mentioned as lacking satisfactory solutions:

• Transformations and coupled transformations of language-aware artefacts, including language definitions, instances and updaters.
• Sound theories and mathematical foundations for software language engineering.
• Human-specific and user-aware languages and interfaces.
• Support for adaptable cyber-physical systems and bringing the language and its elements closer to the intended domain within rich context.
• Software language design guidelines.
• Dealing with incompleteness, uncertainty and user mistakes on the language level.
• Improving language independence of developed tools and advancing language parametric and language agnostic methods.
• Incorporating advanced modern techniques from the fields of artificial intelligence and machine learning, into the software language engineering workflows.

Please note that it is not necessary for the work presented at the workshop to be conclusive yet. Each accepted paper is presented at the workshop as a brief summary of its main idea and a set of open questions to be discussed with the audience. The workshop is planned to have short presentations and long discussions to stimulate direct collaboration afterwards.

Submissions must be made via EasyChair at: https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=staf2025