Bertrand Meyer's technology+ blog

Our online course Computing: Art, Magic, Science, available from EdX, opens this Tuesday (tomorrow, 30 September) at 9 AM Zurich time (and at this time in your area).

An earlier article on this blog described the course, which integrates ten years of experience teaching introductory programming at ETH, and takes advantage of remote-compilation and remote-execution technology from our distributed development research.

You can find the course here.

The Paris computer science bookstore Le Monde en Tique is organizing, this coming Friday, Oct. 3, starting at 5 PM, a signing session for my book Agile! The Good, the Hype and the Ugly [1].

About the book (for readers new to this site): it provides a cold-blooded analysis of agile methods and examines their claims, their value and their limitations.

Le Monde en Tique is well known to technology aficionados in Paris and far beyond. Jean Demétreaux and his team established it at a time when it was hard, slow and expensive to order technical books from international publishers. While other legendary bookstores such a Stacey’s in San Francisco had to close in response to competition from chain stores and Internet offerings, le Monde en Tique (a pun on “tique” words such as informatics and bureautics, and also on ICT, in French TIC) has found new markets and lives on. It is set in a historic building in the medieval heart of Paris [2]. They already organized such book signings for the publication of the French translation of Object-Oriented Software Construction [3] and of Touch of Class, the latter reported in this blog [4]. If you are nearby, please come on Friday!

References

[1] Bertrand Meyer: Agile! The Good, the Hype and the Ugly, Springer, 2014,  Amazon page: here, book page: here.

[2] Book signing announcement with access instructions: here.

[3] Bertrand Meyer: Conception et Programmation Orientées Objet (translation of Object-Oriented Software Construction, 2nd edition, Prentice Hall), Eyrolles, Paris 2008, book page here.

[4] Knuth and Company, article on this blog, 19 October 2009, see here.

The French National Research Center (CNRS) has just awarded [1] its annual gold medal to Gérard Berry, a great recognition for an outstanding computer scientist. I first discovered Berry’s work through a brilliant 1976 article, Bottom-Up Computation of Recursive Programs [2], which explained recursion using methods of denotational semantics, and should really figure in collections of classic CS articles. One can hardly understand dynamic programming algorithms, for example, without realizing that they are bottom-up versions of recursive algorithms, through transformations described in the article. I relied extensively on its techniques for my own textbooks, from the advanced concepts of Introduction to the Theory of Programming Languages all the way down to the introductory presentation of recursion in Touch of Class.

Berry then went on to play a founding role in synchronous languages, explaining (in a paper whose reference I don’t have right now) that he went through a revelation of sorts after realizing that the automatic-control industry needed languages completely different from those computer scientists typically love. He created the Estérel language and shepherded it all the way to industrialization, serving as Chief Scientist of Estérel Technologies in the 2000 decade, before coming back to research.

He is also well known in France as a popularizer of informatics (computer science) through a number of successful books aiming at a large audience. He was appointed the first professor of informatics at the Collège de France, and in his inaugural lecture series presented a sweeping description of how information technology advances, based on powerful scientific concepts, permeate today’s world and raise ever new challenges. Hardly could the CNRS have chosen to distinguish a better representative of our discipline.

References

[1] CNRS announcement: here.

[2] Gérard Berry, Bottom-Up Computation of Recursive Programs, in RAIRO (Revue Française d’Automatique, Informatique, Recherche Opérationnelle, Informatique Théorique), tome 10, no R1 (1976), pp. 47-82, available here.

The IEEE’s Harlan Mills award is the principal prize in software engineering. The 2014 recipients are Patrick and Radhia Cousot, recognized for their groundbreaking work on abstract interpretation; Patrick will receive the award at ICSME 2014 on Oct. 1st. The list of previous recipients is here.

I have the privilege of serving as the current committee chair; the deadline for nomination is October 15. Please nominate your favorite software engineering grandee! You can find more information and the nomination form here.

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First week of semester at ETH. The number of incoming informatics (computer science) students has reached an all-time high: 345; see the (bad-quality) picture from day one of “Introduction to Programming”. (And no, the gender distribution has not changed.) So much for fears that MOOCs and such will displace universities; in fact we have not one but two MOOCs to support the course. Computer science is back in fashion!