A paean to programming






A Google search for something entirely unrelated led me to a very old issue of the Daily Nexus, the student newspaper of the University of California, Santa Barbara, where I was teaching back then.  Apparently (I had forgotten all about it of course) I was piqued by a student’s letter to the editor, where he … Read more




New article: obituary of Niklaus Wirth






Bertrand Meyer: Obituary for Niklaus Wirth, in Formal Aspects of Computing, volume 37, issue 2, pages 1-11, published 3 March 2025, available here (publisher’s site). Shortly after Niklaus Wirth — Turing Award winner for his many seminal contributions including Pascal, Algol W, Modula, virtual machines, Lilith/Ceres, railway diagrams, PL/360, seminal textbooks…  — passed away last … Read more




“I don’t have time for administration”






Academic life includes self-governance and require people to sit in committees, take on various duties, serve as director of studies, graduate program director, chair of PhD chair of external relations, department vice chair or chair, dean… Not everyone wants to play. It is not rare to encounter faculty members who tell you bluntly that as … Read more




The power and terror of imagination






Reading notes. From: Quelques éléments d’histoire des nombres négatifs (Elements of a history of negative numbers) by Anne Boyé, Proyecto Pénélope, 2002, revision available here; On Solving Equations, Negative Numbers, and Other Absurdities: Part II by Ralph Raimi, available  here; Note sur l’histoire des nombres entiers négatifs (Note on the History of Negative Numbers) by … Read more




A remarkable group photo






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




New article: scenarios versus OO requirements






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




New book: the Requirements Handbook






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




Introduction to the Theory of Programming Languages: full book now freely available






Short version: the full text of my Introduction to the Theory of Programming Languages book (second printing, 1991) is now available. This page has more details including the table of chapters, and a link to the PDF (3.3MB, 448 + xvi pages). The book is a survey of methods for language description, particularly semantics (operational, … Read more




A problem child?






The latest issue of the New York Review of Books contains a book review by George Stauffer about Alban Berg with this bewildering sentence about Berg’s childhood: He showed few signs of musical talent as a youth aside from informal piano lessons, reading through the scores of songs and operas, and playing four-hand arrangements of … Read more