ESEC/FSE 2013: 18-26 August, Saint Petersburg, Russia






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




A Pretty Good Motto






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




Negative variables and the essence of object-oriented programming (new paper)






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




Hitting on America






  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




Loop invariants: the musical






  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