Use MPS to Unleash the Creativity of Domain Experts: Language Engineering Is a Key Enabler for Bringing Innovation in Industry

The work of domain experts is essential for the success of each company. Despite the fact that they have unique needs, many domain experts work with general purpose, low semantics tools, and ad-hoc-created tool chains. Generic domain agnostic tools force experts to fill a big encoding gap due to missing abstraction. The use of inadequate tools brings a large amount of accidental complexity, and instead of being productive and creative, experts spend a lot of time fighting against tools. Using appropriate domain-specific modeling languages (DSMLs) increases development efficiency and enables advanced tool support. In this chapter we present our experience gained over the last five years with instantiating domain-specific languages and tooling, built with MPS, in three different business domains within Siemens in order to enable innovative use cases, which releases domain experts from repetitive work and helps them focus on intrinsically complex domain problems and being more creative. We describe how we use MPS to allow experts to explore their domain and describe the MPS core features which made our work possible.