Bertrand Meyer's technology+ blog
Software engineering, programming methodology, languages, verification, general technology, publication culture, and more
Bertrand Meyer Over breakfast at your hotel you read an article berating banks about the fraudulent credit card transactions they let through. You proceed to check out and bang! Your credit card is rejected because (as you find out later) the bank thought [1] it couldn’t possibly be you in that exotic place. Ah, those banks! They … Read more
The DEVOPS 2019 workshop (6-8 May 2019) follows a first 2018 workshop whose proceedings [1] have just been published in the special LASER-Villebrumier subseries of Springer Lecture notes in Computer Science. It is devoted to software engineering aspects of continuous development and new paradigms of software production and deployment, including but not limited to DevOps. … Read more
A reminder about this year’s LASER school, taking place in Elba, Italy, June 1 to 9. The theme is AI + ML + SE and the speakers: Shai Ben-David, University of Waterloo Lionel C. Briand, University of Luxembourg Pascal Fua, EPFL Eric Meijer, Facebook Tim Menzies, NC State University Me Details at https://www.laser-foundation.org/school/. From that … Read more
There is a fateful ritual to keynote invitations. The first message reads (I am paraphrasing): “Respected peerless luminary of this millennium and the next, Will your excellency ever forgive me for the audacity of asking if you would deign to leave for a short interlude the blessed abodes that habitually beget your immortal insights, and … Read more
Nulle part, dans la cohue des exégèses du mouvement des « gilets jaunes », ne trouve-t-on l’explication pourtant évidente : c’est pour partie une affaire de droit commun et pour le reste un coup de main proto-fasciste. Rien d’autre. L’aspect le plus clair est celui de la délinquance. Dans quel autre pays civilisé des énergumènes se mettent-ils, pour … Read more
Imagine having had coffee, over the years, with each of Euclid, Galileo, Descartes, Marie Curie, Newton, Einstein, Lise Leitner, Planck and de Broglie. For a computer scientist, if we set aside the founding generation (the Turings and von Neumanns), the equivalent is possible. I have had the privilege of meeting and in some cases closely … Read more
An article published here a few years ago, reproducing a note I wrote much earlier (1992), pointed out that conventional wisdom about the history of software engineering, cited in every textbook, is inaccurate: the term “software engineering” was in use before the famous 1968 Garmisch-Partenkichen conference. See that article for details. Recently a colleague wanted … Read more
To buy a Zurich Opera ticket online you have to register on their site, including choosing a form of address from a list which beats any I have seen: As a side detail, their system does not work: to enable registration and booking it is supposed to send you an email with your password, and … Read more
The EAQSE workshop is devoted to Empirical Answers to Questions of Software Engineering. The deadline is looming. Just announced: Tom Zimmerman from Microsoft Research will deliver the keynote. Tom is uniquely qualified; he has performed unique studies of what people, particularly software engineering practitioners, expect from empirical research. See hereand there. Outstanding papers. See also … Read more