Static analysis of Java enterprise applications: frameworks and caches, the elephants in the room, Antoniadis et al., PLDI'20 Static analysis is a key component of many quality and security analysis tools. Being static, it has the advantage that analysis results can be produced solely from source code without the need to execute the program. This ... Continue Reading

Watchman: monitoring dependency conflicts for Python library ecosystem Wang et al., ICSE ‘20 There are more than 1.4M Python libraries in the PyPI repository. Figuring out which combinations of those work well together is not always easy. In fact, we have a phrase for navigating the maze of dependencies modern projects seem to accumulate: “dependency ... Continue Reading

Programs, life cycles, and laws of software evolution, Lehman, Proc. IEEE, 1980 Today's paper came highly recommended by Kevlin Henney and Nat Pryce in a Twitter thread last week, thank you both! The footnotes show that the manuscript for this paper was submitted almost exactly 40 years ago - on the 27th February 1980. The ... Continue Reading

Reverb: speculative debugging for web applications, Netravali & Mickens, SOCC'19 This week we'll be looking at a selection of papers from the 2019 edition of the ACM Symposium of Cloud Computing (SoCC). First up is Reverb, which won a best paper award for its record and replay debugging framework that accommodates speculative edits (i.e., candidate ... Continue Reading

Synthesizing data structure transformations from input-output examples, Feser et al., PLDI'15 The Programmatically Interpretable Reinforcement Learning paper that we looked at last time out contained this passing comment coupled with a link to today's paper choice: It is known from prior work that such [functional] languages offer natural advantages in program synthesis. That certainly caught ... Continue Reading

How do committees invent?, Conway, Datamation magazine 1968 With thanks to Chris Frost for recommending this paper - another great example of a case where we all know the law (Conway's law in this case), but many of us have not actually read the original ideas behind it. We're back in 1968, a time when ... Continue Reading

Declarative assembly of web applications from predefined concepts De Rosso et al., Onward! 2019 I chose this paper to challenge my own thinking. I’m not really a fan of low-code / no-code / just drag-and-drop-from-our-catalogue forms of application development. My fear is that all too often it’s like jumping on a motorbike and tearing off ... Continue Reading