Hi, it seemed to be a good time to finally introduce myself. I’m Ed Seidewitz, CTO, Model Driven Solutions. I am based in Frederick, Maryland, USA – but that just means I work from home these days!
Programming language design was one of the things that first got me interested in computer science almost 50 (!) years ago. However, my career path has led me to be more involved in modeling language design rather than programming language design, especially as related to the well-known Unified Modeling Language (UML).
Over the past 20 years or so, I have had a leading role in the development of various standards giving precise execution semantics to a growing subset of UML, including specifications for Foundational UML (fUML), the Action Language for fUML (Alf), Precise Semantics for Composite Structure (PSCS) and Precise Semantics for State Machines (PSSM). Model Driven Solutions also maintains open-source reference implementations for fUML and Alf, at http://fuml.modeldriven.org and http://alf.modeldriven.org.
For the last couple of years, though, I have been mostly consumed by work on version 2 of the Object Management Group (OMG) Systems Modeling Language (SysML). Sandy Fridenthal and I co-lead the SysML v2 Submission Team (SST), a cross-industry team of over 120 individuals across more than 70 organizations, working together to create this new specification. I know that seems like a huge committee process, but we have really been surprisingly agile, continually prototyping our evolving language design, largely based around a textual notation with graphical visualization.
Indeed, for almost a year now, we have been making quarterly public incremental releases of our prototype implementation and other tutorial material. Our 2020-06 release was just made public recently, and it is available at http://www.openmbee.org/sysml-v2-release/2020-06, if you are interested in taking a look. This will be the last SysML v2 public release before we make an initial submission of the proposed new specification to OMG, for review at the upcoming (virtual) OMG meeting in September. We plan to make another public release after the OMG meeting and, at that time, make all our implementation code available under an open source license. I would be very happy if there was interest in the wider language engineering community to provide constructive review and critique of the work we have done!
Until then, I just wish I had more time to follow the many interesting posts in from this group!
Ed