Bertrand Meyer's technology+ blog
Software engineering, programming methodology, languages, verification, general technology, publication culture, and more
First week of semester at ETH. The number of incoming informatics (computer science) students has reached an all-time high: 345; see the (bad-quality) picture from day one of “Introduction to Programming”. (And no, the gender distribution has not changed.) So much for fears that MOOCs and such will displace universities; in fact we have not … Read more
My colleagues and I have just finished recording our new MOOC (online course), an official ETH offering on the EdX platform. The preview is available [1] and the course will run starting in September. As readers of this blog know, I have enthusiastically, under the impulsion of Marco Piccioni at ETH, embraced MOOC technology … Read more
(Adapted from an article previously published on the CACM blog.) Often, you will be told that programming languages do not matter much. What actually matters more is not clear; maybe tools, maybe methodology, maybe process. It is a pretty general rule that people arguing that language does not matter are defending bad languages. Let us … Read more
For almost anyone programming in Eiffel, contracts are just a standard part of daily life; Patrice Chalin’s pioneering study of a few years ago [1] confirmed this impression. A larger empirical study is now available to understand how developers actually use contracts when available. The study, to published at FM 2014 [2] covers 21 programs, … Read more
The SCOOP concurrency model has a clear division of objects into “regions”, improving the clarity and reliability of concurrent programs by establishing a close correspondence between the object structure and the process structure. Each region has an associated “processor”, which executes operations on the region’s objects. A literal application of this rule implies, however, … Read more
I have mentioned this paper before (see the earlier blog entry here) but it is now going to be published [1] and has been significantly revised, both to take referee comments into account and because we found better ways to present the concepts. We have endeavored to explain better than in the draft why the … Read more