One of the surprises for me at Code Generation 2009 was during the keynote, when I passed round a list for people to sign up to receive a pre-print of the Worst Practices for Domain-Specific Modeling article that was to appear in IEEE Software. When the list came back, I was astonished to see that basically the entire audience had signed up -- never underestimate the appeal of "free"!

I think the article is important, in that it is the first study of a large sample of DSM languages. The 20 worst practices identified were analysed from a sample spanning:

• 76 cases of DSM
• 15 years
• 4 continents
• several tools
• 100 language creators
• 3 to 300 modelers per case

IEEE Software has now published the next issue after the special issue on DSM, so it seems a fair time to point you to the final version of our article, available for free download:

Worst Practices for Domain-Specific Modeling
Steven Kelly and Risto Pohjonen
IEEE Software, vol. 26, no. 4, pp. 22-29, July/Aug. 2009
doi:10.1109/MS.2009.109

Stop press: thanks to the efforts of the tireless Yoshio Asano of Fujisetsubi, the article is also available in Japanese from the same page. Domo arigato, Yoshio-san!