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about the same. Thus, while the overall complexity
is reduced with newer Java versions, the overhead en-
tailed by using a general purpose language for writing
model transformations still seems to be present.
For future work, we propose to also look at the
transformation development process as a whole, in-
stead of only at the resulting transformations. In
particular, we are interested in investigating how the
maintenance effort differs between transformations
written in a GPL and those written in a MTL. For this
purpose, the presented artefacts can be reused. Sim-
ple modifications to the ATL transformations can be
compared to what needs to be adjusted in the corre-
sponding Java code. Furthermore, because develop-
ers are the first to be impacted by the languages, it is
also important to include users into such studies. For
this reason, we propose to focus on user-centric study
setups to be able to better study the impact of the lan-
guage choice on developers.
Another potential avenue to explore is the compar-
ison with a general purpose language that has a more
complete support for functional programming such as
e.g. Scala. Additional features such as pattern match-
ing and easier use of functional syntax for translating
OCL expressions into could potentially help to further
reduce the complexity of the resulting transformation
code.
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