Current responsibilities

Since September 2007, I'm research director at INRIA Lille leading the RMoD Team. During 10 years, I co-directed with O. Nierstrasz the Software Composition Group. I'm the president of ESUG. I co-founded Synectique a company that offered specific tools for Software analysis. I'm one of the leader of Pharo: a new exciting dynamic language. Check the Pharo consortium. Here is a short CV. My ORCID Number is 0000-0001-6070-6599.

Awards and Indexes

Some people consider that h-index is not a good criteria for researcher evaluation. To me this is just one among others. Trying to understand it, it looks like it shows a bit the width of your research (i.e., that several topics got reasonance within a community). Personally I do not work with this metrics in mind, I just try to publish the best results I have with my co-workers and thank them for their energy. According to google scholar my h-index is 61 (schoolar.g).

Reflection about Users

Pharo 9.0 has 790 packages for 10658 classes and 143420 methods. It has around 250 forks on github https://github.com/pharo-project/pharo/ and Pharo is composed out of several github projects such as pharo-vcs, pharo-graphics, or pharo-spec. Pharo has around 18 regular contributors and up to 100 occasional ones. In addition Pharo has many users (we roughly estimate around 10 000) and Pharo is taught is around 30-40 universities worldwide and used by aroudn 30 research teams. It has also an industrial consortium. Pharo runs on 11 different platforms and multiple architectures 32/64 bits, / Intel/ARM. This raises the important question of how many citations is worth one real user (not one of our students). I do not have definitive answer on that point but it is important to understand that there is a Huge difference between a research prototype and a real system and Pharo is a real system with real customers. This requires a large development effort. We are lucky because Inria researcher evaluation takes this into account. Now this is an important question for funding agencies and any evaluation of my team.

News

Research

My research statement is double: (1) How can we help companies to support the evolution and maintenance of their large applications and (2) how can we improve languages to better support evolution?

Maintenance and Software Evolution

I'm interested in all the aspects of software evolution and maintenance of large systems. I consulted for companies. Do not hesitate to contact me. I'm interested in your problems.

Language Design

I'm interested in revisiting foundational bricks of object-oriented languages such as encapsulation, reuse, message passing. Now I start to work on isolation and security in reflective object-oriented languages.

Editorial, teaching and vulgarisation

Program Committees

Here are some of the international conferences I was PC member. I declined more often committee participation for health reason. I declined for ICSE 2013, ECOOP 2013, ECOOP 2014, ECOOP 2015 (but I was be the workshop chair), PLDI 2007, and OOPSLA 2006. I declined to be associate editor of SCP Journal because of the Elsevier policy regarding articles access. I also think that people should have less power and that there is a too large concentration in PCs. Some recent experiences showed that a PC would reject 60% of the papers than another would accept. Therefore we should really pay attention to our process in general and the conclusions we draw about them.
  • ECOOP 2022.
  • PC chair of International conference on Software Reuse.
  • Onward 18, Program commity of APSEC 14.
  • European Conference on Object-Oriented Programming (ECOOP 05, 07, 10) -- Core A *.
  • International Conference on Software Maintenance (ICSM 05, 06, 07, 08, 10, 11) -- Core A.
  • European Conference on Software Maintenance and Reengineering (CSMR 06, 07, 08).
  • International Conference on Program Comprehension (ICPC 06, 07, 08).
  • International Conference on the Unified Modeling Language (UML 03, 04, Models/UML 05, Models 06, 07, 09, 10) -- Core A.
  • International Dynamic Languages Symposium (DLS 05, 06, 2020).
  • International Symposium on Software Variability: a Programmers Perspective (SVPP 08).
  • International Conference on Extreme Programming (XP 00, 01).
  • International Conference on Objects, Models, Components, Patterns (TOOLS 2009, 2010, 2011).
  • Working Conference on Reverse Engineering (WCRE 02, 05, 06, 10).
  • International Conference on Software Composition (SC 09).