Doctoral seminars

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Monday, September 28th 2009, 14:00 PM in Celestijnenlaan 200A, 03.112, 3001 Leuven-Heverlee

Automatic Refactoring of Erlang Programs

by Kostis Sagonas

Most programmers write code. Good programmers write code that works. Very good programmers besides writing code that works also rewrite their code in order to simplify it, clean it, and make it more succinct, modern and elegant. While there will probably never be any real substitute for very good programmers, one might wonder whether there is some intrinsic reason why certain code rewriting tasks cannot be automated and become part of the development tool suite so that all programmers can readily and effortlessly employ them on their code. This talk will describe opportunities for using program analysis and transformation to automatically modernize applications written in Erlang, cleaning them up, eliminate certain bad smells from their code and occasionally also improve their performance. In addition, we will present concrete examples of code improvements and our experiences from using a software tool with these capabilities, tidier, on Erlang code bases of significant size.