Education Archives - Page 8 of 8 - Bertrand Meyer's technology+ blog

Concurrent programming is easy

17 April 201420 June 2011 by Bertrand Meyer

Concurrent programming raises very hard problems. But the difficulty should be for the implementers of a concurrency model, not the application programmers. This article discusses concurrency challenges and presents the new SCOOP implementation which targets them.

Assessing concurrency models

17 April 201412 June 2011 by Bertrand Meyer

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?

Stendhal on abstraction

17 April 201429 May 2011 by Bertrand Meyer

From an unlikely source, a lucid description of data abstraction and the principles of object technology.

Publish no loop without its invariant

17 April 201412 May 2011 by Bertrand Meyer

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.

Every bilingual dictionary should be a Galois connection

17 April 20149 November 2010 by Bertrand Meyer

An example of a seemingly fundamental requirement that every bilingual dictionary should satisfy (and that dictionaries on the market fail to meet), is that the relationship it defines between two languages must be a Galois connection

Another DOSE of distributed software development

17 April 201416 June 2010 by Bertrand Meyer

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

17 April 201419 May 2010 by Bertrand Meyer

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

17 April 201410 April 2010 by Bertrand Meyer

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

17 April 201419 December 2009 by Bertrand Meyer

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

17 April 201411 August 2009 by Bertrand Meyer

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