Crossing the gap from imperative to functional programming through refactoring

  • Authors:

  • Alex Gyori;Lyle Franklin;Danny Dig;Jan Lahoda

  • Affiliations:

  • University of Illinois, USA;Ball State University, USA;Oregon State University, USA;Oracle, Czech Republic

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 2013 9th Joint Meeting on Foundations of Software Engineering
  • Year:
  • 2013

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Abstract

Java 8 introduces two functional features: lambda expressions and functional operations like map or filter that apply a lambda expression over the elements of a Collection. Refactoring existing code to use these new features enables explicit but unobtrusive parallelism and makes the code more succinct. However, refactoring is tedious: it requires changing many lines of code. It is also error-prone: the programmer must reason about the control-, data-flow, and side-effects. Fortunately, refactorings can be automated. We designed and implemented LambdaFicator, a tool which automates two refactorings. The first refactoring converts anonymous inner classes to lambda expressions. The second refactoring converts for loops that iterate over Collections to functional operations that use lambda expressions. Using 9 open-source projects, we have applied these two refactorings 1263 and 1709 times, respectively. The results show that LambdaFicator is useful: (i) it is widely applicable, (ii) it reduces the code bloat, (iii) it increases programmer productivity, and (iv) it is accurate.