John Sturdy
I am a postdoctoral research fellow on the B4STEP project (Building a
Bi-directional Bridge Between Software ThEory and Practice) in the CSIS department at the Ollscoil Luimnigh (University of
Limerick) in Ireland.
Research interests
My old research area was reflective programming languages, and I'm
still interested in this, although not researching it actively for
now. You can read my PhD
thesis to find what I did in this area.
My general research area now is the writing of software -- how it
is done, and how we could do it better. I am researching several
facets of this area, including:
- Conditions
- Under what conditions do we write good software? This includes
some of the less technical issues, such as management, and
software process.
- Techniques
- How do we write good software? There are many aspects to
this. I am interested mainly in the psychological ones -- how do
good programmers think about programming, both in creating new
Programs and modifying existing ones.
- Tools
- Can we improve our conditions and techniques by improving our
tools? As a habitual toolsmith, I have a natural bias towards
this. It builds on the psychology of good programming, by
constructing tools that fit well with, and encourage, good ways
of thinking about the operation concerned.
Within B4STEP, I work on several projects:
- COSPA
- Consortium for Open Source in Public Administration --
encouraging governmental, civic, and other public bodies to go
over to FLOSS and ODS. UL's
major role is the development of a
knowledge-base for sharing information about the migration.
- Clearing the path from mind to source file
- Providing helpful program navigation and editing tools.
- Software Gems
- Some software is of outstanding quality, both functionally and
aesthetically. How, why, what, and how can we write more such software?
Elisp
My research work involves writing elisp; you are welcome to
download code from my research
elisp collection (and also from my general
elisp collection).
I will probably start putting forward Final Year Project proposals
to implement equivalents of some of my research elisp, in Eclipse and
possibly other IDEs.
Teaching
I teach Operating Systems.
Other interests
I have a personal web site
for my other interests. Much of this is out-of-date.
Links
Last modified: Thu May 19 11:28:53 IST 2005