Alan began his career working with embedded systems, including radar systems, and the Southern African Large Telescope.
He then founded a company, providing Value Added Services to Mobile Network Operators.
He discovered Erlang and decided to switch his company’s stack from Java/JBOSS to it. This resulted in a 90% reduction in server costs.
As Alan found himself doing more management work, he began working on Open Source Software to keep his programming skills sharp.
He chose to revive the dormant Haskell Refactorer (HaRe). This led to becoming a contributor to the Glasgow Haskell Compiler, to improve its use in refactoring.
Then Alan founded the Haskell IDE Engine (now the Haskell Language Server), as a single provider of Haskell Tools to IDEs, so people could use HaRe.
Alan’s company was affected by bad conditions, which led to its closure. He took the opportunity to join Meta in the UK, where he has been contributing to the Erlang Developer infrastructure.
A Lint has two parts, identifying a problem, and possibly providing a fix. The first requires scanning the code for patterns that could contain a problematic occurrence, then checking each to see if it does. A fix involves changing the code, based on what has been found. This talk will show how using Semantic Search and Replace, a regex-like string to match Erlang syntax and extract interesting parts, all three of these steps can be simplified dramatically.
Talk objectives: The audience will understand what SSR is, and how it can be used in practice.
Target audience: People who want to write lints/diagnostics for Erlang