Design, Evolution and Use of KernelF

A new Booklet for your Reading Pleasure

This year I had the honour of being invited to give the keynote at the ICMT 2018 conference in Toulouse, France. I talked about about KernelF, the functional language we have built in MPS.

What is interesting about KernelF are the design decisions that result from it being used at the core of DSLs targeted mostly at non-programmers. And it does not need powerful meta-programming facilities to be embeddable and extensible, because this “magic” is provided by the MPS language workbench on which KernelF relies.

I wrote a 100 page booklet to accompany the talk (I submitted only 50 pagesto the proceedings). The booklet contains a discussion of the design goals, some specific design decisions, how the language evolved over its (admittedly not yet very long) life, three case studies for DSLs built on top of it, as well as a language reference and the obligatory appendix on language development with MPS. And the booklet continues with the tradition of putting a beautiful glider on the cover :-)

Get the paper from my Books and Booklet page. KernelF itself is open source as part of the IETS3 project.