I am fascinated
by the intellectual challenge of understanding and controlling the
psychological complexity of software engineering, and I tend to have a
broad interest in all aspects of software engineering. Current effort
is focused on copy-and-paste programming (CnP),
API usability and evolution, and their IDE support.
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One active
project is the
SCL
(Structural Constraint Language) Project. SCL expresses developer
intent directly in terms of constraints on a model of source
code extracted by static analysis and other means, using the SCL
specification language. We have tested SCL for expressiveness,
scalability, and
accuracy on over a million lines of code, from both open-source and
proprietary software (courtesy of net-linx
Americas).
|
The focus now is
on further evaluating and refining SCL through real-world
applications, for better expressiveness, precision, and usability.
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| Other
interests include software
design and
documentation with an emphasis on software frameworks, program
analysis, semantics of programming languages, software tools and
development environments. SCL ties all
these interests together. There are several prerequisites for the
success of SCL. First, in order
to
understand and express constraints, we need to grapple with the notion
of software
structure, which inspires our interests in design and documentation.
Second,
program analysis and semantics of programming languages are means to
achieve SCL. Finally, SCL can be delivered as a software tool for each
programming language. SCL for Java, for example, is available as a
plug-in for the Eclipse IDE. |
