For a little discussion
Hello again,
I hope no one feels offended with this post - it's not my intention.
I've been working with MPS for 3/4 years and I love it; however it seems to me that there's not much acceptance.
I know mbeddr, I know Fabien's work, I know a few blogs that refer MPS and a few more in-house or purely academic projects, but that's it.
Even Jetbrains has lots of webinars, workshops/conferences for all their products, but I see almost nothing related to MPS - it almost seems like MPS is the poor relation :-/
One good thing I've noticed is that this forum has been more active lately :-)
What do you think?
Regards,
Sérgio Ribeiro
Porto - Portugal
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Hi, Sergio!
Not offended at all, sharing thoughts is always positive.
As the new Product Marketing Manager of MPS, I can assure you that we have plans to change this. We believe in the potential of MPS technology so we are investing time and resources to make the next step. All our work, from the marketing side, will be more evident in the upcoming months so stay tuned. Recently, we change the website to improve the communications of MPS, check it out and let us know what do you think: https://www.jetbrains.com/mps/
Best regards,
Oscar
PS: A webinar is coming very soon!
Hi Sergio,
In addition to Oscar's remarks, I think it's good to add that apart from the mbeddr team and Fabien, there are quite a number of other (commercial) projects using MPS, only these are less visible/advertised.
In my work environment, we are using MPS for a growing number of projects.
Best regards,
Eugen
Hi,
@Oscar Rodriguez: those are very good news :-)
@Eugen Schindler: yes I know there're more MPS projects... I, myself, have been working for the last 3/4 years in an MPS-based project at i2S (a Software House in Portugal dedicated to the Insurance market) and at Jetbrains MPS site, they list three more customers...
I think it all may come to visibility and awareness of MPS and, probably, of DSLs usage and LOP (Language Oriented Programming) paradigm.
A simple exercise:
Taking LinkedIn as an example (and, yes, I know it's not a very scientific method as not everyone updates their skills and that is somewhat difficult to be precise with this kind of acronyms):
I've probably added "Jetbrains MPS" to my skills 3 years ago, since then I was approached twice for that specific skill (and I receive several each month for Java or even for some languages that don't appear on my skills).
I routinely search for MPS on LinkedIn jobs and I think that in the last 3 years I saw 3/4 (the last one was the one from Apple that I've posted here yesterday).
At Github:
At stackoverflow there're 55 questions tagged "mps" and 954 tagged "xtext".
Using Google, there're 78K results for "Jetbrains MPS" and 268K for "Xtext".
This has been a long post, sorry :-)
Regards,
Sérgio Ribeiro
Porto - Portugal
Sérgio, I get your point, and we are aware of that. We hope that with our upcoming strategies the numbers will change.
Additionally, I want to share with you that our internal metrics are growing. This month, with the release of MPS 2017.2, we hit a new record of more downloads and page views per month of all time.
The Lamdu and isomorf.io developers just started a subreddit for projectional editors at http://reddit.com/r/nosyntax . Maybe the projectional community would be more successful if the different implementations connected more.
Thanks for sharing @Ysangkok. We will definitely contribute with some content!
I think @Sergio's post has some very good points. The two main points are IMHO
I think most (Java and C) developers are unfortunately not aware that such a nice tool like MPS exists, although they are heavily using other Jetbrains IDEs.
Also I think there's not that much content dealing with MPS on github, developer blogs, developer conferences... The more developers know about MPS the more want to try it out, IMHO.
Regarding the second point, I think it's a bit hard to grasp the core benefits of using MPS in the first place, because there is a entry hurdle to the MPS world. The new home page addresses this problem very well. I like it. Thumbs up!
Overall, I have the feeling the MPS team is moving into the right direction. Most importantly for me, they respond to the community feedback.
Very good points made.
One of the big reasons (aside technical ones) for me to choose MPS, is the collaborative and open attitude of the MPS team and the mbeddr team. It's not just a tool, but something dynamic that is moving more and more into the right direction, as @m sch95 put it.