New MOOC opens Tuesday






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 … Read more




Analysis of agile methods: book signing in Paris this Friday at 5 PM






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 … Read more




A gold medal






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 … Read more




Harlan Mills award 2015: nominations sought






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 … Read more




Record enrollment






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 … Read more