Bertrand Meyer's technology+ blog
Software engineering, programming methodology, languages, verification, general technology, publication culture, and more
Bertrand Meyer (Revised from an article originally published in the CACM blog. Part 2 of a two-part article.) Part 1 of this article (to be found here, please read it first) made fun of authors who claim that software engineering is a total failure — and, like everyone else, benefit from powerful software at every step … Read more
Software verification is progressing slowly but surely. Much of that progress is incremental: making the fundamental results applicable to real programs as they are built every day by programmers working in standard circumstances. A key condition is to minimize the amount of annotations that they have to provide. The article mentioned in my previous post, … Read more
The following presentations from our ETH group in the ICSE week (International Conference on Software Engineering, San Francisco) address important issues of software specification and verification, describing new techniques that we have recently developed as part of our work building EVE, the Eiffel Verification Environment. One is at ICSE proper and the other at … Read more
On April 11 I gave the “Ershov lecture” in Novosibirsk. I talked about concurrency; a video recording is available here. The lecture is given annually in memory of Andrey P. Ershov, one of the founding fathers of Russian computer science and originator of many important concepts such as partial evaluation. According to Wikipedia, Knuth … Read more
The C2Eif translator developed by Marco Trudel takes C code and translates it into Eiffel; it produces not just a literal translation but a re-engineering version exhibiting object-oriented properties. Trudel defended his PhD thesis last Friday at ETH (the examiners were Hausi Muller from Victoria University, Manuel Oriol from ABB, Richard Paige from the University … Read more
The 2013 LASER summer school, organized by our chair at ETH, will take place September 8-14, once more in the idyllic setting of the Hotel del Golfo in Procchio, on the island of Elba in Italy. This is already the 10th conference; the roster of speakers so far reads like a who’s who of software … Read more
Lack of a precise context can render discussions of software engineering and particularly of software quality meaningless. Take for example the (usually absurd) statement “We cannot expect that programmers will equip their programs with contracts”. Whom do you mean? A physicist who writes 50 lines of Matlab code to produce a graph illustrating his latest … Read more