Education

Assessing concurrency models

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In a recent experiment with students we wanted to know how the SCOOP concurrency model compares to Java Threads in terms of ease of learning, program readability and correctness. Our group, however, is heavily involved with SCOOP. How did we address the risk of bias, and other parts of the “Professor Smith Syndrome”? What are our results, and can you believe them?




Publish no loop without its invariant

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There may be no more blatant example of the disconnect between the software engineering community and the practice of programming than the lack of widespread recognition for the fundamental role of loop invariants.







Another DOSE of distributed software development

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The software world is not flat; it is multipolar. Gone are the days of one-site, one-team developments. The increasingly dominant model today is a distributed team; the place where the job gets done is the place where the appropriate people reside, even if it means that different parts of the job get done in different … Read more




From programming to software engineering: ICSE keynote slides available

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In response to many requests, I have made available [1] the slides of my education keynote at ICSE earlier this month. The theme was “From programming to software engineering: notes of an accidental teacher”. Some of the material has been presented before, notably at the Informatics Education Europe conference in Venice in 2009. (In research you can … Read more




Barbie to the rescue

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Efforts to attract more women to computer science evoke C. Northcote Parkinson’s analysis of the progression of the British Navy after World War I: ever more admirals, ever fewer ships [1]. There have been some successes, notably at Carnegie Mellon [2], but mostly we tear our hair in despair while percentages of female informatics students … Read more




Touch of Class book page available

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The book page for Touch of Class (my introductory programming textbook), announced in the book, is finally available, courtesy Vladimir Tochilin: touch.ethz.ch It includes some book extracts (prefaces, table of contents, an entire sample chapter, for which I chose the Recursion chapter), a list of known errata and a wiki page to report new errata, … Read more




“Touch of Class” published

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My textbook Touch of Class: An Introduction to Programming Well Using Objects and Contracts [1] is now available from Springer Verlag [2]. I have been told of many bookstores in Europe that have it by now; for example Amazon Germany [3] offers immediate delivery. Amazon US still lists the book as not yet published [4], but … Read more