Sergey Dmitriev's Blog

Good start, what about other people from IntelliJ, do they have blogs, if so, can you provide links. Thanks a lot and happy holidays!

Thank you!
Blogs by other people from JetBrains will be in the next post.

Sergey, you _are_ awesome :)) It's a wonderful start, please do not worry about your writing style. At least our whole family has subscribed ;)

Thank you, Sashka, for you kind words!

Sergey, you mentioned Beelaxy is it still in development or Del.icio.us, GoogleBase etc is reason of development stop?

Hi Sergey --

I'm posting a question that I just posed to Magnus Christerson over at the Intentional web site. I'd be curious as to your take on this:

One of the questions that keeps surfacing in my mind as I read through your blog and also as I read through Martin Fowler's series of articles and his example of creating a domain-specific language with MPS is this:

It is true that in a great number of domains (perhaps every domain) there is a domain language that practitioners and subject matter experts use to characterize what it is that they do. It is not always so clear, however, what it is that end users want from their software. My experience is that many times they don't even know themselves or that at the very least there is an elaborate dance involved in integrating the visions of multiple parties who are often operating themselves at different levels of abstraction and with different and conflicting vocabularies. And in reality the process of domain engineering is only part of what we do when we capture requirements and drive forward to a picture of an intended piece of software. So not only is it a matter of capturing the language and vocabulary that can be used to express intentions, but also of helping business people refine and elaborate the intentions themselves.

Given this, sometimes the picture that y'all are painting strikes me as a bit of a chicken and an egg thing. Is the idea to work with business people first in a domain engineering capacity to come up with the language and editors that will then permit them and us software engineers to explore their requirements? Or does the work on domain-specific languages and the appropriate editors happen in the course of a larger "problem engineering" effort, hand-in-hand, say with a requirements capturing and elaboration toolset. And if this is the case, wouldn't you need the type of product you are describing to be integrated with good requirements capture and refinement tools, along the lines of what is articulated in the UML standard?

A related question is, if what you are doing is capturing the abstract syntax tree of a problem/solution description and projecting various views of it to your product's users, how can you along the way capture the abstractions and refinements that lead you to that problem/solution description? These will almost by definition not be expressed so cleanly in the language of the domain but will include all sorts of confusions and imperfections that ultimately hopefully will help lead to a precise domain language, but certainly cannot be expected to be at that point from the start?

In a response to one of the comments above, you note that "the subject matter experts are usually perfectly capable of expressing their domain knowledge with fine precision as long as it's expressed in ways they are comfortable with, in their comfort zone." Even if that is true for domain knowledge (which I'm not so sure it always is), the question of hammering out the vision of a software solution is a somewhat separate matter.

So in the end, I guess one of my questions is how you see your products and tools integrating with other tools that might be being used to help model a problem domain and a solution space?