Tool-automation for supporting the DSL learning process

Recent technologies advances reduced significantly the effort needed to develop Domain Specific Languages (DSLs), enabling the transition to language oriented software development. In this scenario new DSLs are developed and evolve at fast-pace, to be used by a small user-base. This impose a large effort on users to learn the DSLs, while DSL designers can use little feedback to guide successive evolutions, usually just based on anecdotal considerations. We advocate that a central challenge with the proliferation of DSLs is to help users to learn the DSL and providing useful analyses to the language designers, to understand what is working and what is not in the developed DSL. In this position paper we sketch possible directions for tool-automation to support the learning processes associated with DSL adoption and to permit faster evolution cycles of the DSL