Bertrand Meyer, Author at Bertrand Meyer's technology+ blog

Averaging

17 April 201415 November 2011 by Bertrand Meyer

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

John McCarthy

17 April 20147 November 2011 by Bertrand Meyer

John McCarthy, who died last week at the age of 84, was one of the true giants of computer science. Most remarkable about his contributions are their diversity, their depth, and how they span both theory and practice

The story of our field, in a few short words

17 April 201416 October 2011 by Bertrand Meyer

A history of software engineering in words of five letters or less.

PhD position: concurrent programming (SCOOP) for robotics

17 April 201412 October 2011 by Bertrand Meyer

The ETH Chair of Software Engineering has won a grant from the Hasler foundation, in a joint project with the Technical University of Lucerne and the Autonomous Systems Lab of ETH, to develop a robotics framework involving concurrent computation. The project, called Roboscoop, will produce a demonstrator system: a “SmartWalker” robot — a robotic version … Read more

The charming naïveté of an IEEE standard

17 April 20145 October 2011 by Bertrand Meyer

Naïve misunderstanding of basic undecidability results is common; it is touchingly refreshing to find it in an IEEE standard.

Fun with Bayes

12 December 201424 September 2011 by Bertrand Meyer

Statistical translation techniques are great but the examples cited show their limits. I truly hope that in the future they can be combined with more exact techniques based on sound linguistic theory.

Nastiness in computer science

17 April 201427 August 2011 by Bertrand Meyer

Are we malevolent grumps? Nothing personal, but as a community computer scientists sometimes seem to succumb to negativism.

All Bugs Great and Small

17 April 201423 August 2011 by Bertrand Meyer

Do high bug detection rates signal bad software, or better testing tools?

European Computer Science Summit 2011

17 April 201418 August 2011 by Bertrand Meyer

ECSS is not a typical scientific conference; like Snowbird, its counterpart in the US, it is focused on professional and policy issues, and also a place to hear from technology leaders about their research visions. For me it is one of the most interesting events of the year.

A safe and stable solution

17 April 20142 August 2011 by Bertrand Meyer

Reading about the latest hullabaloo around Android’s usage of Java, and more generally following the incessant flow of news about X suing Y in the software industry (with many combinations of X and Y) over Java and other object-oriented technologies, someone with an Eiffel perspective can only smile. Throughout its history, suggestions to use Eiffel … Read more