Statement for Bruno C . d . S . Oliveira

My research interests are in the area of programming languages, with a focus on functional programming and object-oriented programming. I am especially interested on the modularity aspects of programs, proofs and programming languages. I am also interested in better programming models for graphs, parallelism and concurrency. I believe that existing programming languages and proof/programming techniques have several limitations with respect to modularity. Starting with McIlroy [17] vision of software as components, modularity has been seen as a holy grail of software engineering for over 40 years. However, the reality is that programming languages still strugle with basic modularity issues. Most of these issues are well-known to the programming languages and software engineering communities, which are still trying to address them. The lack of extensibility, as famously emphasized in the expression problem [26], is one of the most basic issues. Another issue are crosscutting and orthogonal concerns (or aspects) such as logging, memoization or security, which have been popularized by Aspect-Oriented Programming [15]. Finally, another problem is the lack of generic programming abstractions in programming languages, which lead to tedious, similar looking boilerplate code in programs. The main goal of my research is to overcome such modularity issues through the design of new programming languages and proof/programming techniques. I strongly believe that improving programming languages and programming techniques with respect to modularity can significantly increase the productivity of programmers by decreasing maintenance costs and increasing flexibility and reuse. My research approach takes a foundational approach where I look into various theoretical aspects of programming to develop general, sound and practical programming models. Much of my inspiration comes from the theory of programming languages, functional programming and the school of the algebra of programming [1].