Once you have a tool to design languages in an agile way, we face the most difficult task: designing them.

The designing of a good language is the main part of the process as it will be the tool of the developers and it will support the semantic intelligence of the system.

Furthermore, since the concepts of the language structure the model itself, before the design it is necessary to know deeply the domain being modeled.

Features of a good language

• High level of abstraction. The higher the level the more powerful will be the language and higher the semantic meaning of the concepts. Also, a high level of abstraction denotes a deep knowledge of the domain to be modeled.
• Simple. It should be easy to use and read. A simple language is often synonymous with a high level of abstraction.
• Different levels of complexity. While it should be simple, it should also allow ways to define deeply details by those who need it.
• Aesthetically pleasing.
• Semantically powerful. In order for a language to be productive, it is only required to provide its concepts with a graphical representation and translations to traditional languages, but if we really want it to be powerful, we must give the concepts other semantic interpretations: auto documentation, auto validation, inference rules, etc.

Requirements of a good designer
From the features of a good language we can derive the requirements:

• Business oriented. Getting a deep knowledge of the domain, in order to design the language, requires a high concern in all the processes that govern it.
• Abstraction skills. Once the domain is known, analytical skills are required in order to identify, with the highest possible level of abstraction, its purest essence.
• Focused on semantics. The language has to be designed under the perspective of finding concepts with a high capacity to represent knowledge.
• Qualities focused on simplicity and aesthetics.

Conclusion
This new development paradigm requires a particular profile to design languages, where not only the former analytical skills are important but also the capability to provide usability and knowledge-representation capacity to the language.

At first, it may seem a complex task but, after all, is part of the evolution of technology where the profiles that contribute most are those with greater capacity for abstraction.
 

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