Bertrand Meyer's technology+ blog
Software engineering, programming methodology, languages, verification, general technology, publication culture, and more
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
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
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
[This is a verbatim copy of a post in the Communications of the ACM blog, 9 January 2024.] I am still in shock from the unexpected death of Niklaus Wirth eight days ago. If you allow a personal note (not the last one in this article): January 11, two days from now, was inscribed in … Read more
August of last year brought the sad news of Barry Boehm’s passing away on August 20. If software engineering deserves at all to be called engineering today, it is in no small part thanks to him. “Engineer” is what Boehm was, even though his doctorate and other degrees were all in mathematics. He looked the … Read more
… is to have a top scientist spot your talent and encourage you, however humble your status may be then. Wikipedia has a terse entry about Dirk Rembrandtsz (with “sz” at the end), presented as a “seventeenth-century Dutch cartographer, mathematician, surveyor, astronomer, teacher and [religious dignitary]” with “more than thirty scientific publications to his name” … Read more
It is customary for an article to carry some kind of lesson or moral. This one does not. Or to be more exact it does have a lesson, several perhaps, but they are left to the reader to draw. It is also customary, for an article that is written as a tribute to deceased people, … Read more
Science progresses through people taking advantage of others’ insights and inventions. One of the conditions that makes the game possible is that you acknowledge what you take. For the originator, it is rewarding to see one’s ideas reused, but frustrating when that happens without acknowledgment, especially when you are yourself punctilious about citing your own … Read more
What can you do to or with an algorithm? In other words, what is a good verb to substitute for the hyphen in “— the algorithm”? You can learn an algorithm. Discovering classical algorithms is a large part of the Bildungsroman of a computer scientist. Sorting algorithms, graph algorithms, parsing algorithms, numerical algorithms, matrix algorithms, graphical … Read more
Another completely unexpected gem from the Viaje de Turquia (see the previous article on this blog): a 16-th century statement of the Dunning-Kruger effect! An effect, of course, which has never been more visible than today (just watch the news). Against Pedro, who narrates his travels and travails, the dialog sets two other characters, friends … Read more