Model driven engineering is not cool

New programming languages are cool. Agile is cool. Cloud is cool. MDE / modeling is clearly not cool. Every time I mention the word model I get the immediate question: where is the proof that MDE improves productivity / quality /… ty. Instead if I talk about the latest programming language (new Agile method, new cloud platform,…) everybody gets excited and nobody asks if somebody has done any research on whether the new language is better than existing ones. They always give it at least the benefit of the doubt.

I wonder why this is not the case with MDE. Maybe the memories of the UML fever still hurt. Maybe there is something intrinsic in MDE that repels people. Maybe we should stop doing research on new MDE technologies and instead try to understand how we could change people’s perception and make MDE cool. That would probably the biggest advancement in the field of the last 10 years!

Two last things:

• We do have some proof about the benefits of modeling (see an example) but this is not the topic of this post
• I’m not saying that cool technologies do not bring any benefit (nor that right now we don’t have proof of that). I’m highlighting they were massively adopted before that proof exsisted.

http://modeling-languages.com/mde-is-not-cool/ (via Jordi Cabot)

[...] Meinte Boerma
One of the reasons that MDE is not cool is precisely that it has an uncool history (in the form of MDA, UML, 4GL, CASE tools, etc.) 

[...] Gleen

I’m going to have to disagree with Frank. MDE is not cool with programmers precisely because they want to spend their time coding. With MDE, you spend most of your time modeling and not coding.

As a programmer, I think MDE is cool because you do spend time meta-programming which I find to be very geeky and intellectually challenging in a oddly relaxing way. Most programmers aren’t into that at all. They are quite uncomfortable with modeling because they think it is for wannabees and posers who want to pretend that they can code but really cannot.