Bertrand Meyer

See http://bertrandmeyer.com/about

Webinar today: the Varieties of Loop Invariants

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I did not have time to complete my Monday post this week; it will be for next Monday (title: Never design a language). In the meantime, here is the announcement for today’s Saint Petersburg Software Engineering seminar , which can be followed live at http://sel.ifmo.ru/seminar/live (19:30 Saint Petersburg time, meaning 16:30 Zurich/Paris, 7:30 PDT on … Read more




Various interviews

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Over the past few months I have given a few interviews to Russian news outlets on technology- and software-related issues. Here are the links I have. In September, Mikhail Saprykin interviewed me [1] for Kommersant (the main Russian business daily) on a question that worries everyone in technology and academia: the brain drain. In early … Read more




Webinars Dec. 29: (1) Model-based contracts (2) Assessing agile methods

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The Saint Petersburg Software Engineering seminar (organized jointly by ITMO and SPbSPU universities) takes place every Thursday, normally 18-21. You can find the program at   http://sel.ifmo.ru/seminar/ . Starting with the Dec. 29 seminar, the talks can now be attended remotely. You can follow them live (i.e. starting at 18:00 SP time, 15:00 Zurich/Paris, 9 … Read more




Guest article: funding great research

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In a blog article posted in its original version on this blog [1] and in a revised version on the Communications of the ACM blog [2], I emphasized the relevance of incremental research. Recently Mikkel Thorup sent me some interesting comments, which I am publishing here as the first Guest Column of this blog. References … Read more




Ado About The Resource That Was (Not)

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The resources we have at our disposal on a computing system may be huge, but they are always finite, and our programs’ appetite for resources will eventually exhaust them. At that stage, we have to deal with the SBYBAW rule, which sounds like a tautology but is an encouragement to look for clever algorithms: techniques for freeing resources when no resources remain may not request new resources.







Averaging

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  A statistical textbook [1] contains this gem of wisdom: Only a fool would conclude that a painting that was judged as excellent by one person and contemptible by another ought therefore to be classified as mediocre. Common sense indeed; but does the procedure not recall how the typical conference program committee works, with averages … Read more