Software engineering, programming methodology, languages, verification, general technology, publication culture, and more
Tony Hoare at the LASER summer school, September 2007 (All photographs in this article are by Bertrand Meyer) Had they included just one of Tony Hoare’s major achievements, many scientific careers would be considered prestigious enough. His had a long list, which I am going to try to summarize, not pretending to get anywhere clause … Read more
It must be a sign of how terrified people are of Modern-AI, and running out of arguments to decry it, that we now read and hear, ever more often, pronouncements that “it is not intelligent”. They come from the many self-appointed great minds who pontificate about AI these days, as well as some truly great … Read more
Société pour la Défense de l’Imparfait du Subjonctif (SDIS) Compte-rendu de l’assemblée annuelle 2025, 1er décembre 2025. Présents : Président, Secrétaire, Premier et Second vice-présidents, Trésorier, représentant des adhérents. Le Secrétaire (Bertrand Meyer) ouvre la séance à 17 heures et souhaite la bienvenue à tous les participants. La séance se poursuit avec le rapport du … Read more
[This note was first published in my newsletter (23 November 2025. One can subscribe to the newsletter here.] I might sound like a broken record, but the CloudFlare outage is one more example of the consequences of the software industry making the wrong technical choices. Where were the contracts? Rust, by all accounts the language … Read more
(A version of this note was published as three separate articles in the Communications of the ACM blog.) Work in engineering, science or technology can only be effective if it relies on precisely defined concepts. For the fundamental notions taught at school, particularly in mathematics, physics, and chemistry, the definitions, honed over centuries, have become … Read more
We are all familiar with the classical mode of teaching. The instructor and other attendees, each sitting alone in a geographical location as far away as possible from all the others, look at shared PowerPoint slide and a grid of black rectangles with names. The names refer to students, although they are usually not their … Read more
Here is an extract from of an exchange between ChatGPT and me. Previous elements: I am writing a text on a topic that I know well but not to the point of considering myself an expert. Along the way, I am asking ChatGPT for information, or confirmation of information that I think I know. Indeed, … Read more
The news is so bad right now everywhere that it is natural to take refuge in discussing matters of (bad) style. I have things to say about the real issues too but not this time. I am following in the tradition of Niklaus Wirth who told me that he regularly sent letters of complaint to … Read more
New article: “Do AI models help produce verified bug fixes?” (Huang Li, Ilgiz Mustafin, Marco Piccioni, Alessandro Schena, Reto Weber and Bertrand Meyer), submitted for publication, preprint available on arXiv. Automatic Program Repair (APR) involves four steps: Locating the bug. Producing candidate corrections. Validating them (to make sure that they do correct the problem). Selecting the … Read more
A Google search for something entirely unrelated led me to a very old issue of the Daily Nexus, the student newspaper of the University of California, Santa Barbara, where I was teaching back then. Apparently (I had forgotten all about it of course) I was piqued by a student’s letter to the editor, where he … Read more