The INRIA RMoD Team led by S. Ducasse has an open position on traits. http://rmod.lille.inria.fr/ http://stephane.ducasse.free.fr/ End of the campaign : May 4, 2009 Beginning of the positions: from September to December 2009 CONTEXT INRIA, the national institute for research in computer science and control, is dedicated to fundamental and applied research in information and communication science and technology (ICST). The Institute has a workforce of 3,700, 2,900 of whom are scientists from INRIA and its partner organizations. INRIA has an annual budget of 162 million euros, 20% of which comes from its own research contracts and development products. INRIA develops many partnerships with industry and fosters technology transfer and company foundations in the field of ICST - some eighty companies have been funded. Startups are financed in particular by INRIA Transfert, a subsidiary of INRIA that supports four startup funds. The international collaborations are based on an incentive strategy of welcoming and recruiting foreign students as well as developing strong exchanges between research scientists. Priority is given to geographic zones with strong growth: Europe, Asia and North America while maintaining reasonable cooperation with South America, Africa and Middle-East. from http://www.inria.fr/lille/scientific-research/research-teams/RMOD_page : The goal of RMoD is to support remodularization of object-oriented applications. This objective is tackled from two complementary perspectives: reengineering and modularity constructs for programming languages. In the reengineering perspective we will propose new analyses to understand and restructure existing large applications (specialized package metrics, adapted visualizations, layer identifications). In the modularity construct context we will work on a pure trait-based language and new modular abstractions. We will also propose the definition of dedicated secure language constructs based on a modular and layered kernel as one direct application of modularization. These programming language constructs will be experimented on Pharo, a platform for dynamic web development. Pharo will be used as a testbed for a pure-traits language, which will be used to assess the impact of modular classes in terms of reuse orthogonally to inheritance. SCIENTIFIC CONTEXT Recently, traits have been proposed as a single inheritance backward compatible solution in which the composing entity has the control over the trait composition. Traits are fine-grained units used to compose classes, while avoiding many of inheritance and mixin-based approaches. To evaluate the expressiveness of traits, some hierarchies were refactored, showing code reuse. However, such large refactorings, while valuable, may not be facing all the problems, since the hierarchies were previously expressed within single inheritance and following certain patterns. In addition traits have always been considered in addition to class inheritance but not as the main composition and reuse mechanism. Goals We are in the process of designing a pure traits based language. We want to evaluate the impact of having only traits as building blocks and removing inheritance from an object-oriented language. We expect the candidate to take part of the design of a pure traits- based programming language, to perform analysis on large piece of software for remodularisation purposes and redesign a library. We expect the candidate to implement the core of a pure trait-based language and some representative examples. Expected Skills -have good skills in interpretation of object-oriented programming languages (classbased, prototypes, mixins...) - have an expertise in object-oriented programming languages outside Java, C++ and C# - be fluent in English Bilbiographical References: 1 Alexandre Bergel, Stéphane Ducasse, Oscar Nierstrasz and Roel Wuyts, Stateful Traits and their Formalization, Journal of Computer Languages, Systems and Structures, 2008. 2 Damien Cassou, Stphane Ducasse and Roel Wuyts, Redesigning with Traits: the Nile Stream trait-based Library, International Conference on Dynamic Languages 2007, 2007, pp. 50-79. 3 Stéphane Ducasse, Oscar Nierstrasz, Nathanael Schaerli, Roel Wuyts and Andrew Black, Traits: A Mechanism for fine-grained Reuse, ACM Transactions on Programming Languages and Systems (TOPLAS), vol. 28, no. 2, March 2006, pp. 331-388. 4 Luigi Liquori and Arnaud Spiwack, FeatherTrait: A Modest Extension of Featherweight Java, ACM Transactions on Programming Languages and Systems (TOPLAS), 2007, To appear. 5 Nathanael Schaerli, Stéphane Ducasse, Oscar Nierstrasz and Andrew Black, Traits: Composable Units of Behavior, Proceedings of European Conference on Object-Oriented Programming (ECOOP'03), LNCS, vol. 2743, Springer Verlag, July 2003, pp. 248-274. APPLICATION REQUIREMENTS Applicant should have held a doctorate or Ph.D. for less than one year or you are about to obtain one and you would like to carry out a fulfilling research activity in the field of ICST (information and communication science and technology) or in a related field. POSITION SALARY 2,357.30 EUR gross per month (Social security already payed) SOCIAL SECURITY BENEFITS - Entitled to unemployment benefit at the end of the contract; - Affiliated to the French social security system. HOW TO APPLY Thank you for applying directly on the institute's website, by following this link: = http://www.inria.fr/travailler/opportunites/postdoc/postdoc.en.html