| What is the Goal of Epsilon? [message #1862732] |
Sun, 24 December 2023 05:04  |
 Michael Sipos
Messages: 1
Registered: December 2023 |
Junior Member |
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I love the philosophy of Model Driven Development and strongly believe it will become widespread in being used for rapidly developing software, but have several major grievances with the Eclipse EMF world and its community's lack of interest in teaching anyone outside of a small clique of universities and institutions on how to actually use it.
Like most EMF-based tools: Epsilon has been around since the 2000s, but has not become mainstream due to the painfully small amount of teaching materials and tutorials for such tools. It is one thing to create something useful, something different to let others know WHY it's useful, and still another thing entirely to teach them HOW to use and WHERE it can be used in their jobs.
Not only does there need to be documentation for the software, but tutorials on how to use various parts of Epsilon and hands-on examples of how it can be used in the workflows of programmers. Otherwise it will remain an obscure curiosity in Eclipse's repository.
I say this because I have noticed your work and the work of others in the EMF world for the past 8 years and still haven't seen anything substantial in the world of videos, tutorials, or articles that try to reach out to the outside world.
Recordings of hour-long workshops have not (nor will ever) reach out to the mainstream of programmers that don't have an hour to spend on something they likely have little to no knowledge of. Videos should be playlists of 5-25 minute videos that cover various parts of the framework, how to use them, and how to replace or supplement current workflows with them. There should also be various examples of how it can be used in actual software (not Gantt Charts, Task Lists, or other things that project managers would simply use an off-the-shelf tool for).
Rust, for example, has been around since 2007 and is now reaching widespread awareness and will eventually begin to overtake several other languages because it marketed itself to developers with examples of how their language's features could improve how they wrote code. [u]You need to focus on what users would actually use the software to build and how it can improve their lives[\u], appealing only to researchers and businessmen (which is my best guess for why there are Gantt Chart and Task List examples instead of deployable components) will never get your project adopted by the mainstream of developers and companies. This is because most managers aren't interested in forcing their employees to use tools they don't understand or even know about, and developers aren't interested in programmatic ways to do their bosses jobs.
Please put time and effort into showing the average programmer how to use your software, otherwise this project will remain in obscurity.
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| Re: What is the Goal of Epsilon? [message #1863030 is a reply to message #1863027] |
Thu, 11 January 2024 18:50  |
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Thank you for your suggestions. We do agree that there is still work to be done in terms of developing training material, but it is also a matter of finding the time and resources to do that. One initiative that has been helpful is the MDENet network, funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council at the UK.
MDENet has kickstarted a community of practice around MDE (with researchers and practitioners from both inside and outside the UK), and it runs periodic research demos and training events - we've covered not only Epsilon there, but also a broad range of MDE tools. It has motivated as well the creation of a number of YouTube videos and various teaching materials around MDE. If it sounds interesting, I'd suggest joining and pitching in :-).
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