Reflecting on Higher Order Transformations: Challenges and Opportunities

The area of Model Driven Engineering focuses on the transformation of models into source code. However, large projects require complex transformation patterns which are difficult to implement and maintain. New language features could represent often used transformation patterns. However, extending a transformation language is not the preferred solution to keep the language concise. Therefore we introduce the notion of Higher Order Transformations that manipulate these new language features and transform them back in the original language. In this paper we will explain the challenges of using Higher Order Transformations and the opportunities these techniques provide.