Ed Seidewitz is recognized as one of the founders of the model based development of Software and systems. He will give a talk about “UML as a Programming Language” on December 3th, 2014, 4 p.m. at Technische Universität Wien, 1040, Favoritenstraße 11/EG, Seminarraum Zemanek.

The Unified Modeling Language (UML) is, of course, a modeling language. But there are now standard, executable semantics for a subset of UML (known as Foundational UML or fUML) and a standard language that provides a textual representation for this subset (the Action Language for fUML or Alf). Doesn’t this just make at least this subset of UML into a programming language?

Well, yes. After all, a programming language is really itself a modeling language for modellng computations that can actually be executed on computation hardware. In this view, all programs are models, but only some models, the executable models, are programs. Which means that an “executable modelling language” is, by definition, a programming language.

But is this a good thing? That is the question to be explored in this talk, which will argue that the answer is “yes”. And, moreover, UML as a programming language may, in fact, be important for moving forward in a number of, perhaps, unexpected areas, including agile development methods and programming for multi-core architectures.