Interview with Patrick Alff

Our guest in this episode is Patrick Alff, an experienced technical manager and entrepreneur. During his long career, Patrick was involved in several large projects that use domain-specific languages and model-driven development to tackle complexity with great success.

Highlights

I’ve always been very keen in the well structured approach, and I’ve always been very intrigued by inception (…): how do multiple people create something together? And also about collaboration: how do you make it such that people of different backgrounds, different knowledge, understand each other, can communicate together? I think these things brought me into this model-driven design and DSL environment and made me a big fan of all that.

If the software development takes, let’s say, one day, all the activities around it take four days (…) It’s mind blowing, really. That’s how I got into this thinking about, “Okay, how can we make this more interactive, faster, less expensive? (…) That’s how we started this whole MARTE Project.

When you draw a diagram of something, and/or you describe a protocol of something that’s ruled or something, it’s very abstract. (…) The sooner you can make it executable and simulated and make it work, the sooner (…) the inventor or the creator of the process or the algorithm, can actually put himself into the shoes of the user, and see, “No, it’s not quite doing what I thought it would be doing,” and fix it.

The medical people got way more involved in the design of the algorithm. Whereas before we had basically one iteration with maybe on second iteration to fix whatever was really broken at the very end after 18 months, now, they would get immediate feedback on how that algorithm worked.

If you cannot see any communication problems between different expertises, then you don’t need DSL. It’s domain-specific, that’s what the DS stands for. (…) But if you need to communicate your code or co-design your code, I mean the code not the GUI, with people of a business or often industry who are not in the software industry, then you should consider a DSL.

We want to develop what we call the Virtual Mental Health Clinic, which is a behavioral digital therapeutic solution. (…) We will be using something that’s recent as well, which is what we call Behavioral e-Biomarkers. It will enable the psychiatrist to manage the therapy based on data collected by the patient’s behavior in a companion mobile app.

Personally I believe that DSLs are great. Don’t abuse, but for a right purpose they are just great. Now what’s very unfortunate is it’s not a mainstream thing. It’s not a buzzword, nobody talks about DSLs. (…) Don’t underestimate the work you need to do to sell it within your organization and to your management, because you have no outside support.

Transcript

Sergej: Welcome to Beyond Parsing. This podcast is dedicated to language engineering, creating custom languages, and using them to develop domain-specific software tools.

Federico: We are your hosts, Federico and Sergej, two language engineering consultants.

Sergej: Our guest in this episode is Patrick Alff, an experienced technical manager and entrepreneur. During his long career, Patrick was involved in several large projects that use domain-specific languages and model-driven development to tackle complexity with great success.

Federico: Hi, Patrick. Thank you for joining us. Me and Sergej are very happy to have a chance to talk again with you. We have all worked together in the past, but for our listeners it would be nice if you can introduce yourself and tell us a bit about your experience.

Patrick: First, thank you very much for inviting me to your podcast sessions. I’ve been looking forward to that for a long time. Yeah, well, what can