Reading list

The primary sources behind the lessons, grouped by module, with one line on why each is here. Most of the project's own research notes cite these too; where a note reads a source closely, it is named beside it. Nothing on this list is required to follow the course.

Module A · Where the ideas came from

On drawing software (lesson 1)

• Harel, "Statecharts: A Visual Formalism for Complex Systems", 1987. The notation that survived because it could be executed.
• Fowler, "UmlMode", 2003. Sketch, blueprint, programming language.
• Bell, "Death by UML Fever", ACM Queue, 2004. What happened when people tried harder.
• Petre, "UML in Practice", ICSE, 2013. Interviews with the people who did not use it.
• Hutchinson, Whittle, Rouncefield and Kristoffersen, "Empirical Assessment of MDE in Industry", ICSE, 2011; Whittle, Hutchinson and Rouncefield, "The State of Practice in Model-Driven Engineering", IEEE Software, 2014. Where model-driven engineering worked and where it did not.
• Brambilla, Cabot and Wimmer, Model-Driven Software Engineering in Practice, second edition, 2017. The textbook.
• OMG, BPMN 2.0 (2011), DMN (2015), IFML (2015), SysML v2 (2025). The standards with engines, and the one that made views queries. Read with the project's SysML v2 note and UML coverage note.

On saying what, not how (lesson 2)

• Kowalski, "Algorithm = Logic + Control", Communications of the ACM, 1979.
• Codd, "A Relational Model of Data for Large Shared Data Banks", 1970.
• Forgy, "Rete", Artificial Intelligence, 1982.
• Fielding, Architectural Styles and the Design of Network-based Software Architectures, 2000, chapter 5. Hypermedia as the engine of application state.
• Peyton Jones, Blackwell and Burnett, "A User-Centred Approach to Functions in Excel", ICFP, 2003. The most used functional language.
• Allemang, Hendler and Gandon, Semantic Web for the Working Ontologist, third edition, 2020. The open world for people who build things.
• W3C, SHACL (2017), SPARQL 1.1 (2013), RDF 1.1 TriG (2014).
• Gross, Stepinski and Akşimşek, Hypermedia Systems, 2023.

On generators and DSLs (lesson 3)

• Vlissides, "Generation Gap", 1996, in Pattern Hatching, 1998.
• Czarnecki and Eisenecker, Generative Programming, 2000.
• Stahl and Völter, Model-Driven Software Development, 2006. "Never modify generated code."
• Fowler, "Language Workbenches: The Killer-App for Domain Specific Languages?", 2005.
• Kelly and Tolvanen, Domain-Specific Modeling: Enabling Full Code Generation, 2008.
• Parr, Language Implementation Patterns, 2010, chapters 11 and 12. Logic-free templates. Read with the project's generator kit note.
• Boersma, Building User-Friendly DSLs, 2025. Structure, notation, meaning, constraints; write the reference output first. The same note reads it chapter by chapter.
• Ceri, Fraternali and Bongio, "Web Modeling Language (WebML)", 2000. IFML's parent.

On the failures (lesson 4)

• Selic, "The Pragmatics of Model-Driven Development", IEEE Software, 2003.
• The project's own review triage and product brief, July 2026.

Module B · One graph, every diagram a view

• Brown, The C4 Model for Visualising Software Architecture. The architecture notation.
• W3C, SHACL 1.2 User Interface (draft) and Knublauch's DASH vocabulary. Shapes that drive forms.
• IETF, RFC 9457: Problem Details for HTTP APIs, 2023.
• OMG, BPMN 2.0, chapter 13, execution semantics; DMN, chapter 8, hit policies.
• W3C, ODRL Information Model 2.2, 2018.
• Brandolini, Introducing EventStorming. The workshop the derived storm reproduces; read with the project's DDD note.
• The project's EventCatalog levels, IFML notation and reveal modes notes.

Module C · The hard problems, addressed

• Stevens, "Bidirectional model transformations in QVT: semantic issues and open questions", Software and Systems Modeling, 2010. Why the general problem is hard, and why the project chose tiers. Read with the generation trace note.
• The Reproducible Builds project. Why byte-identical output matters.
• McComb, The Data-Centric Revolution, 2019, and Semantic Arts' gist ontology. Data outlives applications; read with the data-centric model note.
• The project's LLM generator note, artifact management note and domain vocabulary as spec note.

Module D · The frontier

• Löwy, Righting Software, 2019. The IDesign method the first profile encodes.
• Evans, Domain-Driven Design, 2003, part IV. Bounded contexts and context maps.
• OMG, SysML v2, 2025, view definitions and the Systems Modeling API.
• The project's product review note and backlog.

The project's own record

Read in this order if you want the whole story as the project told it: the project outline, the product brief, the review triage, the decision records from 0001 upward, the principles, and the research notes by date. The notes are records: a later finding is added as a revision note, never by rewriting, so each one still says what was believed when it was written.