Bertrand Meyer's technology+ blog
Software engineering, programming methodology, languages, verification, general technology, publication culture, and more
Bertrand Meyer 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
(Adapted from an article in the Communications of the ACM blog.) I have become interested in agile methods because they are all the rage now in industry and, upon dispassionate examination, they appear to be a pretty amazing mix of good and bad ideas. I am finishing a book that tries to sort out the … Read more
(This article first appeared in the Communications of the ACM blog.) The very concept of publication has changed, half of its traditional meaning having disappeared in hardly more than a decade. Or to put it differently (if you will accept the metaphor, explained below), how it has lost its duality: no longer particle, just wave. … Read more