[Haskell-cafe] PhD student on Real-life datatype-generic programming

[Johan Jeuring]

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Vacancy PhD student on Real-life datatype-generic programming
Software Technology,
Utrecht University,
The Netherlands.
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Within the Software Technology group of the Information and Computing  
Sciences department of Utrecht University there is a vacancy for a  
PhD student to work on Real-life datatype-generic programming. The  
position is funded by NWO, the Netherlands Organisation for  
Scientific Research.

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Project summary:

Datatype-generic programming has been around for more than 10 years  
now. We think a lot of progress has been made in the last decade. As  
an example, there are more than 10 proposals for generic-programming  
libraries or language extensions just for the lazy functional- 
programming language Haskell.

Although generic programming has been applied in several  
applications, it lacks users for real-life projects. This is  
understandable. Developing a large application takes a couple of  
years, and choosing a particular approach to generic programming for  
such a project involves a risk. Few approaches that have been  
developed over the last decade are still supported, and there is a  
high risk that the chosen approach will not be supported anymore, or  
that it will change in a backwards-incompatible way in a couple of  
years time.

We propose to create an environment that supports developing real- 
life applications using generic-programming techniques. We will focus  
on developing:
- a library or a mixture of a library with a language extension for  
which we will guarantee continuing support.
- an example of a real-life application fundamentally using generic- 
programming techniques. This application will serve as a showcase for  
generic-programming support for software development and evolution.
- generic-programming design patterns. The usage of the generic- 
programming techniques in real-life projects will exhibit recurrent  
patterns, and will give valuable advice for and help with developing  
other applications using generic-programming techniques.

Thus we will show how generic programming can be used to develop  
powerful tools in little time, and that the resulting tools are easy  
to maintain, adapt, and reuse.
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Requirements: Master degree in Computer Science, or equivalent. Good  
knowledge of functional programming, and several advanced computer  
science techniques. Knowledge of Haskell, parsing, rewriting,  
strategies, generic programming, etc. will be useful.

Terms of employment: the PhD student should start as soon as  
possible, but no later than January 1, 2008.  The position is for  
four years (after one year there will be an evaluation), full-time.  
Gross salary starts with € 1956,-- per month in the first year and  
increases to € 2502,-- in the fourth year of employment.  The salary  
is supplemented with a holiday bonus of 8% and an end-of-year bonus  
of 3%.  In addition we offer: a pension scheme, partially paid  
parental leave, facilities for child care, flexible employment  
conditions in which you may trade salary for vacation days or vice  
versa. Conditions are based on the Collective Employment Agreement of  
the Dutch Universities.

More information about the project can be found on http:// 
www.cs.uu.nl/~johanj/publications/nwo-ew2006.pdf

More information about the Software Technology group on http:// 
www.cs.uu.nl/wiki/Center

More information about the Information and Computing Sciences  
department on http://www.cs.uu.nl/

More information about this vacancy can be obtained from Johan  
Jeuring (johanj at cs.uu.nl, http://www.cs.uu.nl/~johanj/,  +31 6  
40010053).

Send your application in pdf (or another non-proprietary format)  to

SciencePenO at uu.nl	

with a cc to johanj at cs.uu.nl.

on or before July 31, 2007. We expect to arrange interviews in  
September.

Mention vacancy nr 62712.