Bertrand Meyer's technology+ blog
Software engineering, programming methodology, languages, verification, general technology, publication culture, and 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
Front-page notice in yesterday’s Tages Anzeiger (one of the principal Swiss newspapers): Dear Readers: From today the employment-ads section will no longer appear as a separate supplement, but directly as a section of the Tuesdays and Thursday paper. The reason is the ever smaller number of position offerings. It seems clear that what has decreased … Read more
This is a slightly reworked version of an article in the CACM blog, which also served as the introduction to a panel which I moderated at ESEC/FSE 2013 last week; the panelists were Harald Gall, Mark Harman, Giancarlo Succi (position paper only) and Tony Wasserman. For all the books on software engineering, and the articles, … Read more
(Revised from an article originally published in the CACM blog. Part 2 of a two-part article.) Part 1 of this article (to be found here, please read it first) made fun of authors who claim that software engineering is a total failure — and, like everyone else, benefit from powerful software at every step … Read more
The 2013 LASER summer school, organized by our chair at ETH, will take place September 8-14, once more in the idyllic setting of the Hotel del Golfo in Procchio, on the island of Elba in Italy. This is already the 10th conference; the roster of speakers so far reads like a who’s who of software … Read more
(Adapted from an article in the Communications of the ACM blog.) I have become interested in agile methods because they are all the rage now in industry and, upon dispassionate examination, they appear to be a pretty amazing mix of good and bad ideas. I am finishing a book that tries to sort out the … Read more
A search for my name on Google Scholar [1] shows, at the top of the resulting list, my book Object-Oriented Software Construction [2], with over 7800 citations in the scientific literature. Very nice (thanks, and keep those citations coming!). That top result is a link to a pirated version [3] of the full content … Read more
Admittedly the number of people who will find the following funny, or of any interest at all, is pretty limited, so it is a good bet that about 99.86% of the faithful readers of this blog can safely wait for the next post. To appreciate the present one you must be a French-speaking nerd with … Read more