Bertrand Meyer's technology+ blog
Software engineering, programming methodology, languages, verification, general technology, publication culture, and 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
In honor of Niklaus Wirth’s 80-th birthday we are organizing a symposium at ETH on February 20, 2014. This is a full-day event with invited talks by: Vint Cerf Hans Eberlé Michael Franz me Carroll Morgan Martin Odersky Clemens Szyperski Niklaus Wirth himself From the symposium’s web page: Niklaus Wirth was a Professor of Computer … Read more
The 2013 Informatics Europe “Best Practices in Education” award was devoted, this year, to initiatives for teaching informatics in schools [1]. It was given out last week at the European Computer Science Summit in Amsterdam [2]. Two teams shared it, one from Poland and the other from Romania. Both teams showed excellent projects, but the … Read more
Recently I mentioned the first law of branching (see earlier article) to Walter Tichy, famed creator of RCS, the system that established modern configuration management. He replied with the following anecdote, which is worth reproducing in its entirety (in his own words): I started work on RCS in 1980, because I needed an alternative for … Read more
A new version of my Touch of Class [1] programming textbook is available. It is not quite a new edition but more than just a new printing. All the typos that had been reported as of a few months ago have been corrected. The format is also significantly smaller. This change is more than a … Read more
I have mentioned this paper before but as a draft. It has now been accepted by ACM’s Computing Surveys and is scheduled to appear in September 2014; the current text, revised from the previous version, is available [1]. Here is the abstract: Software verification has emerged as a key concern for ensuring the continued … Read more
This report continues the series of ICSE 2013 article previews (see the posts of these last few days, other than the DOSE announcement), but is different from its predecessors since it talks about a paper from our group at ETH, so you should not expect any dangerously delusional, disingenuously dubious or downright deceptive declaration … Read more
(Please note the general disclaimer [1].) How Misclassification Impacts Bug Prediction [2], an article to be presented on Thursday at ICSE, is the archetype of today’s successful empirical software engineering research, deriving significant results from the mining of publicly available software project repositories — in this case Tomcat5 and three others from Apache, as well … Read more
The following presentations from our ETH group in the ICSE week (International Conference on Software Engineering, San Francisco) address important issues of software specification and verification, describing new techniques that we have recently developed as part of our work building EVE, the Eiffel Verification Environment. One is at ICSE proper and the other at … Read more
The C2Eif translator developed by Marco Trudel takes C code and translates it into Eiffel; it produces not just a literal translation but a re-engineering version exhibiting object-oriented properties. Trudel defended his PhD thesis last Friday at ETH (the examiners were Hausi Muller from Victoria University, Manuel Oriol from ABB, Richard Paige from the University … Read more