Jargons for Domain Engineering

We report here our experience with jargons [Nakatani96] for software engineering. Jargons are DSLs that are unusually easy to make. We use jargons within the framework of the Family-oriented Abstraction, Specification and Translation (FAST) domain engineering process [Parnas76] [Cuka98] to automate software production. Previous attempts with FAST had foundered when the DSLs needed for domain modeling took too long to make. Because jargons can be made quickly and easily, they seemed a good alternative to conventional DSLs. Preliminary experiments made us optimistic that jargons would work for FAST. We made jargon equivalents of two existing DSLs that had each taken over a year to make, even using language implementation tools such as yacc [Johnson75]. The results were dramatic. Each jargon took less than a week to make.