Bertrand Meyer's technology+ blog
Software engineering, programming methodology, languages, verification, general technology, publication culture, and more
Bertrand Meyer The CF-Index, or Conference Frustration index, is an integer n (n ≥ 1) defined as follows. You are at a conference where your paper submission was rejected, and sitting in the session devoted to that paper’s very topic. You think for yourself “My paper was at least n times better than the average here”. That … Read more
On 13-15 September 1999 a symposium took place in St Catherine College in Oxford, in honor of Tony Hoare’s “retirement” from Oxford (the word is in quotes because he has had several further productive careers since). The organizers were Jim Woodcock, Bill Roscoe and Jim Davies. The proceedings are available as Millenial Perspectives in Computer … Read more
[This is a verbatim copy of a post in the Communications of the ACM blog, 9 January 2024.] I am still in shock from the unexpected death of Niklaus Wirth eight days ago. If you allow a personal note (not the last one in this article): January 11, two days from now, was inscribed in … Read more
In August I was planning for my participation in the ICTSS conference in Bergamo, Italy, and wanted to find some accommodation within walking distance of the conference place. Bergamo has a medieval “città alta”, high city, at the top of a hill, and a “città bassa”, low city, down in the valley, where modern expansion … Read more
I recently wrote a working paper (on academic careers) and since it was urgently needed I did not want to spend time on style issues but instead to keep things simple. So I preceded it with the comment “Using he’ as an abbreviation for `he or she’.” I received the helpful suggestion that I could … Read more
Are you not tired, too, of those endlessly repeated arguments that, sure, it was not very polite of Putin to invade Ukraine, but you have to understand the situation, it’s all the fault of NATO’s aggressive westward expansion which, you know, was provoking the Russians! You see this argument everywhere on social networks and also … Read more
Maria Naumcheva, Sophie Ebersold, Alexandr Naumchev, Jean-Michel Bruel, Florian Galinier and Bertrand Meyer: Object-Oriented Requirements: a Unified Framework for Specifications, Scenarios and Tests, in JOT (Journal of Object Technology), vol. 22, no. 1, pages 1:1-19, 2023. Available here with link to PDF (the journal is open-access). From the abstract: A paradox of requirements specifications as … Read more
I harbor no illusion about the effectiveness of airing this particular pet peeve; complaining about it has about the same chance of success as protesting against split infinitives or music in restaurants. Still, it is worth mentioning that the widespread use of the word “statement” to denote a programming language element, such as an assignment, that … Read more
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