The ICMT 2018 keynote will be given by Markus Voelter.

Title: The design and evolution of KernelF

Abstract. KernelF is a functional language built on top of MPS. It is designed to be highly extensible and embeddable in order to support its use at the core of domain-specific languages, realising an approach we sometimes call Funclerative Programming. "Funclerative" is of course a mash-up of "functional" and "declarative" and refers to the idea of using functional programming in the small, and declarative language constructs for the larger-scale, often domain-specific, structures in a program. We have used KernelF in a wide range of languages including health and medicine, insurance contract definition, security analysis, salary calculations, smart contracts and language-definition.

In this keynote, I illustrate the evolution of KernelF over the last two years. I discuss requirements on the language, and how those drove design decisions. I showcase a couple of the DSLs we built on top of KernelF to explain how MPS was used to enable the necessary language modularity. I demonstrate how we have integrated the Z3 solver to verify some aspects of programs. I present the architecture we have used to use KernelF-based DSLs in safety-critical environments. I close the keynote with an outlook on how KernelF might evolve in the future, and point out a few challenges for which we don't yet have good solutions.

Biography. Markus Voelter works as a language engineer, bridging the gap from industry and business domains to software systems. He analyses domains, designs user-friendly languages and supporting analyses, and implements language tools and IDEs, architects efficient and reliable backends based on interpreters and generators. He also works on formalisms and meta-tools for language engineering. For 20 years, Markus has consulted, coached and developed in a wide range of industries, including finance, automotive, health, science and IT. He has published numerous papers in peer-reviewed conferences and journals, has written several books on the subject and spoken at many industry conferences world-wide. Markus has a diploma in technical physics from FH Ravensburg-Weingarten and a PhD in computer science from TU Delft.