Bertrand Meyer
The Case of the Handsome Couple
Yesterday’s New York Times carries an article by John Tierney about the 95th anniversary of the king of mathematical puzzles, Martin Gardner. The article is so well done that I will not even try a summary, referring you instead directly to it [1]. Just one detail worthy of note: when he undertook to write a … Read more
Knuth & company
Remember Stacey’s in Palo Alto and San Francisco? Only a decade ago these and other technical bookstores were the mecca of the tech industry, where developers would swarm at any time of day to catch up on the latest releases. One well-known Valley entrepreneur even told me she did her hiring there, spotting customers who … Read more
The CPU Clock principle of software releases
On how to build software, there is still much we do not know for sure; but we have also learned a few principles that can be considered firm. By definition these are not new ideas; today’s principle, for example, is related to what agile developers know as “timeboxing”. But even if they have been published … Read more
Do you know Java?
I am jealous of Emmanuel (Manu) Stapf who blogged about this before I had the time to; but I can at least refer you to his entry [1]. The idea actually comes from Martin Nordio, who as part of his thesis work formalized the exception semantics of both Eiffel and Java. In the process he … Read more
SEAFOOD 2010
The next SEAFOOD (Software Engineering Advances For Offshore and Outsourced Development) conference will take place in Saint Petersburg, Russia, on 17 and 18 June 2010. The conference co-chairs are Andrey Terekhov from Saint Petersburg State University and Lanit-Tercom, and Martin Nordio from ETH are conference co-chairs. Mathai Joseph from Tata Consulting Services and I will … Read more
The one sure way to advance software engineering
Airplanes today are incomparably safer than 20, 30, 50 years ago: 0.05 deaths per billion kilometers. That’s not by accident. Rather, it’s by accidents. What has turned air travel from a game of chance into one of the safest modes of traveling is the relentless study of crashes and other mishaps. In the US the … Read more
Specifying user interfaces
Many blogs including this one rely on the WordPress software. In previous states of the present page you may have noticed a small WordPress bug, which I find interesting. “Tags” are a nifty WordPress feature. When you post a message, you can specify one or more informative “tags”. The tags of all messages appear in the right sidebar, … Read more