[ANN] Postdoc position around Traits and smalltalk

Hi all

We are happy to announce that we are looking for a postdoc around  
traits.

http://www.inria.fr/travailler/mrted/en/postdoc/details.html?id=PNGFK026203F3VBQB6G68LOE1&LOV5=4508&LOV2=4486&LG=EN&Resultsperpage=20&nPostingID=1949&nPostingTargetID=4964&option=52&sort=DESC&nDepartmentID=19



Trait-based Remodularisation
Position type: Post-doctoral Fellow
Functional area: Lille (Villeneuve d'Asq)
Research theme: Communicating systems
Project: ADAM


Environnement
RMod is a research project that is currently being setup at INRIA  
Futurs Lille. We are currently looking for a postdoc in the field of  
modularity in object-oriented programming languages.

Missions
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.

Activités
We are in the process of designing a pure traits based language. We  
want to evaluate how traits enable reuse, and what problems could be  
encountered when building a library using traits from scratch, taking  
into account that traits are units of reuse. We want to evaluate the  
impact of having only traits as building blocks. We expect the  
candidate to take part of the design of a pure traits-based  
programming language, to perform analyzis on large piece of software  
for remodularization purposes and redesign a collection library.

Compétences et Profil
Required knowledge and background
The candidate should absolutely meet the following requirements:
- have good skills in interpretation of object-oriented programming  
languages
- have an expertise in object-oriented programming languages outside  
Java, C++ and C#
- be fluent in English

Informations complémentaires
Publications.
1 Alexandre Bergel, Stéphane Ducasse, Oscar Nierstrasz and Roel Wuyts,  
“Stateful Traits and their Formalization,” Journal of Computer  
Languages, Systems and Structures, 2007, To appear
2 Damien Cassou, Stéphane 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 Schärli, 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 Schärli, 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.
Contact:
[hidden email] and [hidden email]
Additional information
- Having a command in French will ease the candidate insertion in  
Lille but having French skills is _not_ mandatory for this position.
- Your application will be immediately discarded if it follows a  
generic template. In other words, do not try to reuse a previous cover  
letter. Your cover letter should reflect your true interest.
Duration: 1 year
Location: INRIA-Futurs-Lille
Salary: about 1800 euros/month net
Please submit: CV, names and email addresses of maximum three  
refrences, and a cover letter.