Simon Thompson
Creator of Wrangler and co-author of Erlang Programming
University of Kent
Simon Thompson is Professor of Logic and Computation in the Computing Laboratory of the University of Kent, where he has taught computing at undergraduate and postgraduate levels for the past twenty five years, and where he has been department head for the last six.
His research work has centered on functional programming: program verification, type systems, and most recently development of software tools for functional programming languages. His team has built the HaRe tool for refactoring Haskell programs, and is currently developing Wrangler to do the same for Erlang. His research has been funded by various agencies including EPSRC and the European Framework programme. His training is as a mathematician: he has an MA in Mathematics from Cambridge and a D.Phil. in mathematical logic from Oxford.
He has written four books in his field of interest; Type Theory and Functional Programming published in 1991; Miranda: The Craft of Functional Programming (1995), Haskell: The Craft of Functional Programming (2nd ed. 1999) and Erlang Programming (with Francesco Cesarini, 2009). Apart from the last, which is published by O'Reilly, these are all published by Addison Wesley.
His research work has centered on functional programming: program verification, type systems, and most recently development of software tools for functional programming languages. His team has built the HaRe tool for refactoring Haskell programs, and is currently developing Wrangler to do the same for Erlang. His research has been funded by various agencies including EPSRC and the European Framework programme. His training is as a mathematician: he has an MA in Mathematics from Cambridge and a D.Phil. in mathematical logic from Oxford.
He has written four books in his field of interest; Type Theory and Functional Programming published in 1991; Miranda: The Craft of Functional Programming (1995), Haskell: The Craft of Functional Programming (2nd ed. 1999) and Erlang Programming (with Francesco Cesarini, 2009). Apart from the last, which is published by O'Reilly, these are all published by Addison Wesley.
Simon Thompson is Giving the Following Talks
Getting the right module structure: finding and fixing problems in your projects
Low coupling between modules and high cohesion inside each module are the key features of good software architecture. Systems written in modern programming languages generally start with some reasonably well-designed module structure, however with continuous feature additions, modifications and bug fixes, software modularity gradually deteriorates. So, there is a need for incrementally improving modularity to avoid the situation when the structure of the system becomes too complex to maintain.
We demonstrate how Wrangler, a general-purpose refactoring tool for Erlang, can be used to maintain and improve the modularity of programs written in Erlang without dramatically changing the existing module structure. We show how we identify a set of "modularity smells" and then demonstrate how they are detected by Wrangler and removed by way of a variety of refactorings implemented in Wrangler.
We demonstrate how Wrangler, a general-purpose refactoring tool for Erlang, can be used to maintain and improve the modularity of programs written in Erlang without dramatically changing the existing module structure. We show how we identify a set of "modularity smells" and then demonstrate how they are detected by Wrangler and removed by way of a variety of refactorings implemented in Wrangler.
