A software language engineer's potpourri

I am visiting LogicBlox (and hence, transitively, Predictix) in Atlanta to re-learn logic programming properly and see what our SLE super-weapons of massive engineering can do for them. Hence, it probably makes sense to give a talk as a kind of potpourri.

Speaker: Ralf Lämmel (University of Koblenz-Landau)

Title: A software language engineer's potpourri 

Abstract: In this talk, I present some of our recent research results and interests; they all relate to and, in fact, enhance software language engineering in a broad sense.

The first topic is the 101companies project, which is developing into an advanced, structured, linked knowledge resource for software developers. At its heart, 101companies is a software chrestomathy, which illustrates 'many' software languages, technologies, and concepts by implementing a Human Resources Management System 'many' times; each implementation selects from the set of optional features for such a system.

The next topic is linguistic architecture or megamodeling, which helps with understanding software technologies at a high level of abstraction by focusing on the entities (e.g., languages, technologies, programs, metamodels, files) and relationships between these entities (e.g.,  domainOf, codomainOf, inputOf, outputOf, conformsTo, correspondsTo). Megamodeling can be powerfully demonstrated by using the 101companies chrestomathy for illustration.

The next topic is linguistic architecture recovery for software products and software repositories such that some basic aspects of linguistic architecture (e.g., links from source-code artifacts to languages, technologies, and concepts) are recovered  semi-automatically in a scalable manner such that possibly very heterogenous repositories with diverse languages and technologies can be analyzed. The approach relies on an easily configurable rule-based system that performs various analyses on a product or repository of interest. Such architecture recovery can again be powerfully demonstrated by using the 101companies chrestomathy for illustration.

The last topic is about drilling deeper into language-usage analysis such that a given corpus is understood in terms of coverage of the language constructs, metrics, cloning, validity, and other dimensions of language usage.

Slides: [.pdf]

Pointers:


Acknowledgment: 

Various members of the SoftLang Team at Koblenz and collaborators have contributed on the results and visions presented in this talk. The aforementioned papers are coauthored with these researchers:
  • Jean-Marie Favre (University of Grenoble)
  • Dragan Gašević (Athabasca University)
  • Martin Leinberger (Master student in the team)
  • Ekaterina Pek (PhD student in the team) 
  • Thomas Schmorleiz (Master student in the team)
  • Andrei Varanovich (PhD student in the team)

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