Yesterday was the 6th OOPSLA Workshop on Domain-Specific Modeling. As usual it was the biggest workshop at OOSPLA, but this year things have really got big. There were 41 attendees and 22 accepted papers -- you can check them out on the proceedings page. We only ask for position papers, since sharing and learning from each other through interaction in the workshop(*) is the main thing. Even so, the quality of the papers was high overall: all but a few would have qualified as "real" research or experience papers.

Of course, there are always people who are new to the area, and haven't had time to find out about related research. Or then haven't bothered :-). That can be frustrating for people who've worked in this field for longer, and this workshop of course has the world's highest concentration of such old-timers -- both the MetaCase and GME crowd have been doing this for about 15 years. Even some relative newcomers can get upset: Markus Voelter gives a good writeup to the workshop, apart from this bit:

Then it became bad. There was a presentation by a guy from a german university (I am not going to mention his name or the university). He talked about some "research results". And I got really frustrated. Why? Because he presented as research results stuff that we had literally written in the MDSD book 1.5 years ago. Don't these people read literature before they do research?

I know what he means, but I'm not sure it's worth getting too worked up about students not knowing what's in a book that was only released 1.5 years ago. Surely it's better that such newcomers are accepted and gently pointed towards previous results, rather than letting our frustration show? Mind you, I admit that the smiling avuncular attitude isn't easy to pull off, when you really want to vent because yet another research or open source project is making a complete hash of something that you did 15 years ago. Still, I suppose I should be happy to put up with this problem, given what it means for MetaCase in a commercial sense... (and if you're annoyed with the lack of humility in that sentence, please humble me, help yourself, and help the cause of DSM at the same time by trying out the new MetaEdit+ 4.5 Pre-Release and sending me bug reports!)