Bertrand Meyer's technology+ blog
Software engineering, programming methodology, languages, verification, general technology, publication culture, and more
Bertrand Meyer In a few weeks I will be teaching again my Introductory Programming course at ETH, based for the first time on the published “Touch of Class” textbook [1]. For fun (mine if no one else’s) every lecture will conclude with a haiku summarizing the topic. I made up a few, given below, and am opening … Read more
Part of the experience of being a scientist, in the industrial age of publication, is the rejection letter; especially the damning review whose author, anonymous of course, does not appear particularly competent. I have my own treasured collection, which I will publish one day. For a fiction so artfully designed as to be almost as good as the real thing, … Read more
Last year I published in IEEE Computer a short paper entitled “Seven Principles of Software Testing” [1]. Although technical, it was an opinion piece and the points were provocative enough to cause a reader, Gerald Everett, to express strong disagreement. Robert Glass, editor of the “Point/Counterpoint” rubric of the sister publication, IEEE Software, invited both … Read more
My textbook Touch of Class: An Introduction to Programming Well Using Objects and Contracts [1] is now available from Springer Verlag [2]. I have been told of many bookstores in Europe that have it by now; for example Amazon Germany [3] offers immediate delivery. Amazon US still lists the book as not yet published [4], but … Read more
[Note: an updated version of this article (June 2011) appears in the Communications of the ACM blog.] The world of research funding, always a little strange, has of late been prey to a new craze: paradigm-shift mania. We will only fund twenty curly-haired cranky-sounding visionaries in the hope that one of them will invent relativity. The rest of … Read more
Once in a while one hits a tool that is just right. An example worth publicizing is the EasyChair system for conference management [1], which — after a first experience as reviewer — I have selected whenever I was in a position to make the choice for a new conference in recent years. At first … Read more
“For someone in search of a software development method, the problem is not to find answers; it’s to find out how good the proposed answers are. We have lots of methods — every year brings its new harvest — but the poor practitioner is left wondering why last year’s recipe is not good enough after … Read more
A spectre is haunting programming — the spectre of null-pointer dereferencing. All the programming languages of old Europe and the New World have entered into a holy alliance to make everyone’s programs brittle: Java, C, Pascal, C++, C# and yes, until recently, Eiffel. The culprit is the use of references to denote objects used in calls: … Read more
What kind of contract do you write? Could these contracts, or some of them, be produced automatically? The idea of inferring contracts from programs is intriguing; it also raises serious epistemological issues. In fact, one may question whether it makes any sense at all. I will leave the question of principle to another post, in … Read more