Dear Colleague:

Today's programmers are designing and building systems of vastly greater scale and complexity than ever before--systems with lifetimes in decades, involving millions of lines of code, implemented over distributed systems, in which no single individual has a complete grasp of the code. To create reliable, scaleable, maintainable systems, a software engineer must apply a wide variety of tools and techniques. One of these is the use of domain-specific languages.

Domain-specific languages can be a vehicle for formal analysis and optimization methods; they can act as a bridge between visual interfaces and the underlying computation; they can serve as (possibly executable) modeling and prototyping languages; and they can serve as network service interfaces.

Domain-specific languages can act as scaffolding for the software engineering process (as with architectural description languages) or they may be used directly (as with layout languages such as HTML). Domain-specific languages enforce a separation of concerns, insulating the user from unnecessary detail and severing machine dependencies. Domain-specific languages extend software design. The result is a formalism, a concrete artifact that permits representation, optimization, and analysis in ways that low-level programs and libraries do not.

The purpose of this Conference on Domain-Specific Languages is to concentrate on the unique aspects of DSL design, implementation, and application in order to form a body of literature on domain-specific languages, and to refine the DSL technique.

The papers in this conference include valuable case studies, surveys, insights in design, techniques for definition, tools for implementation, and studies in alternative and complementary approaches. They were chosen for quality, originality, and relevance.

USENIX conferences are known for their practical focus. DSL '97 will be no exception. You will walk away with a better understanding of when and how to use language as a software engineering tool. But more importantly, you will become part of an emerging community dedicated to understanding the promise and practice of domain-specific languages. This conference offers participation in the discourse on a subject of great potential and inherent appeal.

I invite you to DSL '97, and hope to meet you in Santa Barbara this October.

Sincerely,

Chris Ramming, AT&T Labs Research Program Chair