Bertrand Meyer's technology+ blog
Software engineering, programming methodology, languages, verification, general technology, publication culture, and more
Maria Naumcheva, Sophie Ebersold, Jean-Michel Bruel and Bertrand Meyer, UOOR: Seamless and Traceable Requirements, submitted for publication, February 2025, preprint available on arXiv. This article grew out of Maria Naumcheva’s PhD thesis defended on December 18 at the University of Toulouse (I will write separately about the thesis as a whole). It is part of … Read more
Bertrand Meyer, Software engineering as a domain to formalize, available here. This article is meant as a blog but was written as a standard text and I haven’t had the time to HTML-ize yet. So I am just providing an abstract below, and linking to the PDF which gives the details. The purpose is simple: … 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
Recently I prepared some of my books for free access on the Web (after gaining agreement from the publishers). Here are the corresponding links. They actually point to pages that present the respective books and have further links to the actual PDF versions. Although the texts are essentially those of the books as published, I … Read more
July 14 (still here for 15 minutes) is not a bad opportunity to announced the publication of a new book: The French School of Programming. The book is a collection of chapters, thirteen of them, by rock stars of programming and software engineering research (plus me), preceded by a Foreword by Jim Woodcock and a … 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
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
A full, free online version of Object Success (1995) I am continuing the process of releasing some of my earlier books. Already available: Introduction to the Theory of Programming Languages (see here) and Object-Oriented Software Construction, 2nd edition (see here). The latest addition is Object Success, a book that introduced object technology to managers … Read more
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
I have released for general usage the chapter on axiomatic semantics of my book Introduction to the Theory of Programming Languages. It’s old but I think it is still a good introduction to the topic. It explains: The notion of theory (with a nice — I think — example borrowed from an article by Luca … Read more