Transformations for Abstractions (Looking for a Postdoc or PhD student)

Recently I got notice from NWO, the dutch research funding organization, that the project proposal `Transformations for Abstractions (TFA)' that I submitted last September was accepted. (In a very competitive round; only 15% of proposals was accepted this year.) As a consequence, I have funding for a three year postdoc or a four year PhD student position. The topic of the project is language extensions (abstractions), in general, and extension of transformations on/for language extensions, in particular. Here is the summary of the proposal:

This proposal is about techniques at the intersection of two areas of software engineering. (1) In order to automate software engineering we would like to automate the process of producing programs by means of automatic transformations, thereby computing with programs as we do with other data. (2) In order to improve the expressivity of programming languages to the concepts and notations of specific application domains, we would would like to extend general-purpose languages with domain-specific abstractions. Combining these desiderata leads to the need to extend transformations for new domain-specific abstractions.

The goal of this project is to develop a systematic approach to the extension of general purpose languages with domain-specific abstractions, integrating those abstractions in the syntax and transformations of the programming environment. This requires research into the following issues:

• strategies for the definition of domain abstractions
• mechanisms for open extensibility of transformations
• methods and patterns for design of open transformations
• constraints for independent extensibility of transformations
• derivation of transformation extensions from definitions of abstractions

We approach this goal by analyzing a variety of existing domain-specific languages and transformations, developing generic extensibility mechanisms, and validating these first in an `in vitro' setting and then in a programming environment for the Java language. The project builds on a solid body of work from the Stratego/XT project that will allow us to concentrate on the core of the problem, rather than being distracted by infrastructural issues.

If you are interested in the project, either as a candidate for the position or as a collaborator, I would like to hear from you. Further information (such as the full project proposal) is available on request.