Bertrand Meyer's technology+ blog
Software engineering, programming methodology, languages, verification, general technology, publication culture, and more
Over breakfast at your hotel you read an article berating banks about the fraudulent credit card transactions they let through. You proceed to check out and bang! Your credit card is rejected because (as you find out later) the bank thought [1] it couldn’t possibly be you in that exotic place. Ah, those banks! They … Read more
A reminder about this year’s LASER school, taking place in Elba, Italy, June 1 to 9. The theme is AI + ML + SE and the speakers: Shai Ben-David, University of Waterloo Lionel C. Briand, University of Luxembourg Pascal Fua, EPFL Eric Meijer, Facebook Tim Menzies, NC State University Me Details at https://www.laser-foundation.org/school/. From that … Read more
An article published here a few years ago, reproducing a note I wrote much earlier (1992), pointed out that conventional wisdom about the history of software engineering, cited in every textbook, is inaccurate: the term “software engineering” was in use before the famous 1968 Garmisch-Partenkichen conference. See that article for details. Recently a colleague wanted … Read more
(Originally published on CACM blog.) Most of the world programs in a very strange way. Strange to me. I usually hear the reverse question: people ask us, the Eiffel community, to explain why we program our way. I hardly understand the question, because the only mystery is how anyone can even program in any other … Read more
There is one more speaker at the LASER 2018 summer school two weeks from now: Dominic Woerner from Bosch. Mr. Woerner is a solution architect for Internet of Things and distributed ledger applications with Bosch Digital Solutions, and a researcher within the Bosch Economy of Things research project. He did his PhD at ETH Zurich … Read more
Interview (in Russian) of Nadia Polikarpova (who proved the correctness of the EiffelBase 2 library in her PhD at ETH and is now an assistant professor at UCSD) on the site of her original university, ITMO. She explains the US tenure-track system to Europeans — good luck! She also says that programming language people are … Read more
We “core” computer scientists and software engineers always whine that our research themes forever prevent us, to the delight of our physicist colleagues but unjustly, from reaching the gold standard of academic recognition: publishing in Nature. I think I have broken this barrier now by disproving the old, dusty laws of physics! Brace yourself for … Read more
(Reposted from the CACM blog [*].) Software engineering was never a popular subject. It started out as “programming methodology”, evoking the image of bearded middle-aged men telling you with a Dutch, Swiss-German or Oxford accent to repent and mend your ways. Consumed (to paraphrase Mark Twain) by the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, might actually … Read more
The full lineup of speakers at the 2018 LASER summer school on Software for Blockchains, Bitcoin and Distributed Trust is now ready, with the announcement of a new speaker, Primavera De Filippi from CNRS and Harvard on social and legal aspects. The other speakers are Christian Cachin (IBM), Maurice Herlihy (Brown), Christoph Jentzsch (slock.it), me, … Read more