Bertrand Meyer's technology+ blog
Software engineering, programming methodology, languages, verification, general technology, publication culture, and more
The European Software Engineering Conference takes place every two years in connection with the ACM Foundations of Software Engineering symposium (which in even years is in the US). The next ESEC/FSE will be held for the first time in Russia, where it will be the first major international software engineering conference ever. It comes at … Read more
Antoine Galland (1646-1715), one of the great orientalists of the classical age, was sent by the government of Louis XIV to the court of the Sultan. Among his many discoveries he revealed the Thousand and One Nights and other Arabian Tales to the Western public through his French translation, Les Mille et Unes Nuits, Paris … Read more
In modeling object-oriented programs, for purposes of verification (proofs) or merely for a better understanding, we are faced with the unique “general relativity” property of OO programming: all the operations you write (excluding non-OO mechanisms such as static functions) are expressed relative to a “current object” which changes repeatedly during execution. More precisely at the … Read more
The following rules are not all that’s needed to understand life, but they go a long way. 1. It’s the tenor who gets the girl. (The baritone never stood a chance1.) 2. It’s the physicists who get the money. Note 1Actually I can think of a couple of exceptions (both Russian, I wonder … Read more
The study of agile methods is good for your skeptical bones. “Build the simplest thing that works, then refactor if needed.” Maybe. Maybe. But what about getting it right the first time around? Erich Kästner wrote an apposite ditty on this topic [1]: They tell you it’s OK if first you fail; OK perhaps … Read more
Actually it is not a musical but an extensive survey. I have long been fascinated by the notion of loop invariant, which describes the essence of a loop. Considering a loop without its invariant is like conducting an orchestra without a score. In this submitted survey paper written with Sergey Velder and Carlo Furia … Read more
I have updated my publication list [1] to include recently published and accepted papers, and some ongoing work. Most of the papers are collaborative, reflecting the work of our ETH and ITMO groups on verification, concurrency and methodology. Reference [1] Publication list, available here (in various formats).