Bertrand Meyer's technology+ blog
Software engineering, programming methodology, languages, verification, general technology, publication culture, and more
Bertrand Meyer (Adapted from an article previously published on the CACM blog.) Often, you will be told that programming languages do not matter much. What actually matters more is not clear; maybe tools, maybe methodology, maybe process. It is a pretty general rule that people arguing that language does not matter are defending bad languages. Let us … Read more
Last week at the the CSEE&T conference in Klagenfurt (the conference page is here, I gave a keynote), a panel discussed how universities should prepare students for software engineering. Barry Boehm, one of the panelists, stated the following principle, which afterwards he said he had learned from Simon Ramo, co-founder of TRW. In hiring … Read more
For almost anyone programming in Eiffel, contracts are just a standard part of daily life; Patrice Chalin’s pioneering study of a few years ago [1] confirmed this impression. A larger empirical study is now available to understand how developers actually use contracts when available. The study, to published at FM 2014 [2] covers 21 programs, … Read more
The SCOOP concurrency model has a clear division of objects into “regions”, improving the clarity and reliability of concurrent programs by establishing a close correspondence between the object structure and the process structure. Each region has an associated “processor”, which executes operations on the region’s objects. A literal application of this rule implies, however, … Read more
A functional-programming style, or more generally a style involving more expressions and fewer instructions, is possible in Eiffel. In particular, Eiffel’s agent mechanism embeds a full functional-programming mechanism in the object-oriented framework of the language. To make the notations simpler, we are discussing and tentatively implementing a number of proposed extensions. They involve no fundamental … Read more