Sprat: hierarchies of domain-specific languages for marine ecosystem simulation engineering

Scientific software is becoming more complex and its development nowadays is often an interdisciplinary process in which usually scientists -- most of them without training in software engineering -- implement the software themselves. To help them achieve a good code quality, we propose to employ a process called Sprat based on the concept of hierarchies of domain-specific languages (DSLs). In such a hierarchy, every DSL constitutes an implementation platform for the DSL directly above it. Each role in the development process (i.e., a scientist from a specific discipline) implements a layer of the software in a DSL belonging to the hierarchy. Therefore, the scientists only deal with abstractions they are familiar with from their respective domain and a clear separation of components is attained. To evaluate the Sprat approach, we present its application to the development of the Sprat simulation -- a marine ecosystem model for long-term fish stock prediction.