In the age of the digital transformation, every business and every company eventually needs to write software in some way. After all, "software is eating the world" and business that we all thought were mature and well developed, get disrupted by small startups that are smart enough to leverage the possibilities of software (for example, Uber, AirBnb, or Tesla). It is pretty clear that in future software development will become even more important than it is today. In order to meet the ever increasing demand of software systems, we need to find ways to enable more people to participate and contribute in software development.

Domain-Specific Languages (DSL) are a way to define powerful interfaces for domain experts to help them participating in software development process. DSLs not only help to do more with less code, but also significantly improves communication between stakeholders. Furthermore, it reduces maintenance costs greatly as it decouples technical aspects from domain aspects.

Xtext is the one-stop solution for building DSLs, and is widely used in industry and research. It not only lets you define a parser, but also provides you with a full environment, including rich IDEs and text editors to support your DSL. It is everything you need to help professionals work efficiently.

Lorenzo has written an excellent book on DSL engineering with Xtext, that is both a great reference as well as a good way to learn the most important parts of the framework. If you are a software developer that wants to add an important and powerful new weapon to your tool belt, I can only recommend reading this book and diving into the possibilities of language engineering.

Sven Efftinge

Founder of Xtext and Xtend