Domain-specific languages (DSLs) are of utmost importance in scientific high- performance computing to reduce development costs, raise the level of abstraction and, thus, make scientific programmer’s life easier. The parallel particle-mesh environment (PPME) is a DSL and a programming environment for numerical simulations based on the particle method. The main goals of PPME are 1) to provide a high-level, easy to learn language for developing particle-based simulations and 2) to leverage the domain- specific knowledge encoded in PPME programs for optimizing the generated code. To achieve these goals, PPME relies on a projectional editing approach rather than a conventional text editor. This, on the one hand, enables users to describe their problems using conventional mathematical notation and, on the other hand, it provides a typed graph-based data structure that paves the ground for automatic analyses and optimizations. PPME follows a generative approach: it generates parallel Fortran code that links with the parallel particle-mesh library (PPM), which has been developed by the MOSAIC group. PPM provides efficient implementations of the particle and mesh abstractions, discrete numerics, as well as an abstraction layer on the underlying high-performance computing hardware.