[erlang-questions] Tidier - when is the public release?

[Kostis Sagonas]

Kenji Rikitake wrote:
> I've just read the following two papers of Konstantinos (Kostis) Sagonas
> and Thanassis Avgerinos, which are also a very good example of Erlang
> refactoring and coding styles:

Thanks for your kind comments!

Of course I am very partial, but I strongly recommend reading the
following two papers to anybody interested in writing better Erlang
programs.

> Sagonas, K. and Avgerinos, T. 2009. Automatic refactoring of Erlang
> programs. In Proceedings of the 11th ACM SIGPLAN Conference on
> Principles and Practice of Declarative Programming (Coimbra, Portugal,
> September 07 - 09, 2009). PPDP '09. ACM, New York, NY, 13-24. DOI=
> http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1599410.1599414
> Also available at:
> http://www.ece.cmu.edu/~aavgerin/papers/PPDP09.pdf
> 
> Avgerinos, T. and Sagonas, K. 2009. Cleaning up Erlang code is a dirty
> job but somebody's gotta do it. In Proceedings of the 8th ACM SIGPLAN
> Workshop on ERLANG (Edinburgh, Scotland, September 05 - 05,
> 2009). ERLANG '09. ACM, New York, NY, 1-10. DOI=
> http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1596600.1596602 
> Also available at:
> http://www.ece.cmu.edu/~aavgerin/papers/Erlang09.pdf
> 
> So my question: when will be the first public release of Tidier?  
> 
> I really want to give it a try, after reading the paper.

We have no current plans to make tidier freely available as a tool that
users can download.  (Though to a very small number of companies and
individuals who have been very eager to try the tool on their code bases
and have contacted us privately, we have sold user licenses.)

However, we strongly want to encourage the /free use of tidier/ in open
source Erlang code bases.  It has long been on our TODO list to create a
web site for tidier where users can upload their code and either get it
back cleaned up automatically or interactively clean up their code by
cherry-picking the refactorings that they fancy.  Unfortunately, this
plan has not materialized, partly due to being extremely busy with other
stuff (for example, this is what happens when one starts a Ph.D. in
another country) but mostly due to the lab machines that would host the
site being in a state of upgrade for a long time now.

If all goes as planned, we expect that we'll have the site for tidier up
and running sometime in the beginning of January.  There will be an
announcement on this list.  Till then -- or for projects which are not
open source -- obtaining a user license is the only available option.

Kostis