Bertrand Meyer's technology+ blog
Software engineering, programming methodology, languages, verification, general technology, publication culture, and more
Bertrand Meyer Un chef d’état donne une conférence de presse ; par exemple Emmanuel Macron, président de la république française, le 17 avril dernier. Les journaux publieront des commentaires louangeurs ou critiques, mais en premier lieu, si ce sont des journaux d’information, ils rendront compte de ce qui a été dit. Leur manchette sera du genre de … Read more
A full, free online version of Object Success (1995) I am continuing the process of releasing some of my earlier books. Already available: Introduction to the Theory of Programming Languages (see here) and Object-Oriented Software Construction, 2nd edition (see here). The latest addition is Object Success, a book that introduced object technology to managers … Read more
In my previous article I referred to the short story The Seven Messengers by Dino Buzzati, of which I have written a translation. Here is a quantitative analysis. I will also refer the reader to a very nice article published in 2009 on this topic: The Seven Messengers and the “Buzzati Sequence” by Giorgio D’Abramo … Read more
A number of years ago I discovered the short stories of the Italian writer Dino Buzzati (most famous for his novel translated as The Desert of the Tartars). They have a unique haunting quality, for which the only equivalent which I can summon is Mahler’s Des Knaben Wunderhorn or perhaps the last variation of the … Read more
The French president, Emmanuel Macron, and prime minister, Elizabeth Borne, are showing incredible political courage in promoting an indispensable reform of the pension system. The international press (with the exception of one recent reasonable Washington Post editorial) has largely taken the side of the strikers, explaining sententiously that the proper answer would be to tax … Read more
(An English variant will appear tomorrow.) La presse nationale et internationale est déchaînée contre Borne et Macron. Les extrémistes et factieux de tous bords jurent de “mettre le pays par terre” (comment, au passage, peut-on accepter ce genre de langage de la part d’un responsable “syndical”?). Toute la classe politique sait bien sûr que la … Read more
August of last year brought the sad news of Barry Boehm’s passing away on August 20. If software engineering deserves at all to be called engineering today, it is in no small part thanks to him. “Engineer” is what Boehm was, even though his doctorate and other degrees were all in mathematics. He looked the … Read more
Often, “we do this and then we do that” is just a lazy way of stating “to do that, we must have achieved this.” The second form is more general than the first, since there may be many things you can “do” to achieve a certain condition. The extra generality is welcome for software requirements, … Read more
Li Huang (PhD student at SIT) will be presenting at an ISSRE workshop the paper Improving Counterexample Quality from Failed Program Verification, written with Manuel Oriol and me. One can find the text on arXiv here. (I will update this reference with the official publication link when I have it.) The result being presented is … Read more
I am happy to announce the publication of the Handbook of Requirements and Business Analysis (Springer, 2022). It is the result of many years of thinking about requirements and how to do them right, taking advantage of modern principles of software engineering. While programming, languages, design techniques, process models and other software engineering disciplines have … Read more