Bertrand Meyer's technology+ blog

On 13-15 September 1999 a symposium took place in St Catherine College in Oxford,  in honor of Tony Hoare’s “retirement” from Oxford (the word is in quotes because he has had several further productive careers since). The organizers were Jim Woodcock, Bill Roscoe and Jim Davies. The proceedings are available as Millenial Perspectives in Computer Science, MacMillan Education UK, edited by Davies, Roscoe and Woodcock. The Symposium was a milestone event.

As part of a recent conversation on something else, YuQian Zhou(who was also there) sent me a group photo from the event, which I did not know even existed. I am including it below; it is actually a photo of a paper photo but the resolution is good. It is a fascinating gallery of outstanding people in programming and verification. (How many Turing award winners can you spot? I see 7.)

Many thanks to YuQian Zhou, Jim Woodcock and Bill Roscoe for insights into the picture in discussions of the past two weeks.

[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 my mind as the date of the next time he was coming to my home for dinner. Now it is the date set for his funeral.

Niklaus Wirth at the ACM Turing centenary celebration
San Francisco, 16 June 2012
(all photographs in this article are by B. Meyer)

A more composed person would wait before jotting down thoughts about Wirth’s contributions but I feel I should do it right now, even at the risk of being biased by fresh emotions.

Maybe I should first say why I have found myself, involuntarily, writing obituaries of computer scientists: Kristen Nygaard and Ole-Johan Dahl, Andrey Ershov, Jean Ichbiah, Watts Humphrey, John McCarthy, and most recently Barry Boehm (the last three in this very blog). You can find the list with comments and links to the eulogy texts on the corresponding section of my publication page. The reason is simple: I have had the privilege of frequenting giants of the discipline, tempered by the sadness of seeing some of them go away. (Fortunately many others are still around and kicking!) Such a circumstance is almost unbelievable: imagine someone who, as a student and young professional, discovered the works of Galileo, Descartes, Newton, Ampère, Faraday, Einstein, Planck and so on, devouring their writings and admiring their insights — and later on in his career got to meet all his heroes and conduct long conversations with them, for example in week-long workshops, or driving from a village deep in Bavaria (Marktoberdorf) to Munich airport. Not possible for a physicist, of course, but exactly the computer science equivalent of what happened to me. It was possible for someone of my generation to get to know some of the giants in the field, the founding fathers and mothers. In my case they included some of the heroes of programming languages and programming methodology (Wirth, Hoare, Dijkstra, Liskov, Parnas, McCarthy, Dahl, Nygaard, Knuth, Floyd, Gries, …) whom I idolized as a student without every dreaming that I would one day meet them. It is natural then to should share some of my appreciation for them.

My obituaries are neither formal, nor complete, nor objective; they are colored by my own experience and views. Perhaps you object to an author inserting himself into an obituary; if so, I sympathize, but then you should probably skip this article and its companions and go instead to Wikipedia and official biographies. (In the same vein, spurred at some point by Paul Halmos’s photographic record of mathematicians, I started my own picture gallery. I haven’t updated it recently, and the formatting shows the limits of my JavaScript skills, but it does provide some fresh, spontaneous and authentic snapshots of famous people and a few less famous but no less interesting ones. You can find it here. The pictures of Wirth accompanying this article are taken from it.)

Niklaus Wirth, Barbara Liskov, Donald Knuth
(ETH Zurich, 2005, on the occasion of conferring honorary doctorates to Liskov and Knuth)

A peculiarity of my knowledge of Wirth is that unlike his actual collaborators, who are better qualified to talk about his years of full activity, I never met him during that time. I was keenly aware of his work, avidly getting hold of anything he published, but from a distance. I only got to know him personally after his retirement from ETH Zurich (not surprisingly, since I joined ETH because of that retirement). In the more than twenty years that followed I learned immeasurably from conversations with him. He helped me in many ways to settle into the world of ETH, without ever imposing or interfering.

I also had the privilege of organizing in 2014, together with his longtime colleague Walter Gander, a symposium in honor of his 80th birthday, which featured a roster of prestigious speakers including some of the most famous of his former students (Martin Oderski, Clemens Szyperski, Michael Franz…) as well as Vint Cerf. Like all participants in this memorable event (see here for the program, slides, videos, pictures…) I learned more about his intellectual rigor and dedication, his passion for doing things right, and his fascinating personality.

Some of his distinctive qualities are embodied in a book published on the occasion of an earlier event, School of Niklaus Wirth: The Art of Simplicity (put together by his close collaborator Jürg Gutknecht together with Laszlo Boszormenyi and Gustav Pomberger; see the Amazon page). The book, with its stunning white cover, is itself a model of beautiful design achieved through simplicity. It contains numerous reports and testimonials from his former students and colleagues about the various epochs of Wirth’s work.

Niklaus Wirth (right)
with F.L. Bauer, one of the founders of German computer science
Zurich,22 June 2005

Various epochs and many different topics. Like a Renaissance man, or one of those 18-th century “philosophers” who knew no discipline boundaries, Wirth straddled many subjects. It was in particular still possible (and perhaps necessary) in his generation to pay attention to both hardware and software. Wirth is most remembered for his software work but he was also a hardware builder. The influence of his PhD supervisor, computer design pioneer and UC Berkeley professor Harry Huskey, certainly played a role.

Stirred by the discovery of a new world through two sabbaticals at Xerox PARC (Palo Alto Research Center, the mother lode of invention for many of today’s computer techniques) but unable to bring the innovative Xerox machines to Europe, Wirth developed his own modern workstations, Ceres and Lilith. (Apart from the Xerox stays, Wirth spent significant time in the US and Canada: University of Laval for his master degree, UC Berkeley for his PhD, then Stanford, but only as an assistant professor, which turned out to be Switzerland’s and ETH’s gain, as he returned in 1968,)

Lilith workstation and its mouse
(Public display in the CAB computer science building at ETH Zurich)

One of the Xerox contributions was the generalized use of the mouse (the invention of Doug Englebart at the nearby SRI, then the Stanford Research Institute). Wirth immediately seized on the idea and helped found the Logitech company, which soon became, and remains today, a world leader in mouse technology.
Wirth returned to hardware-software codesign late in his career, in his last years at ETH and beyond, to work on self-driving model helicopters (one might say to big drones) with a Strong-ARM-based hardware core. He was fascinated by the goal of maintaining stability, a challenge involving physics, mechanical engineering, electronic engineering in addition to software engineering.
These developments showed that Wirth was as talented as an electronics engineer and designer as he was in software. He retained his interest in hardware throughout his career; one of his maxims was indeed that the field remains driven by hardware advances, which make software progress possible. For all my pride as a software guy, I must admit that he was largely right: object-oriented programming, for example, became realistic once we had faster machines and more memory.

Software is of course what brought him the most fame. I struggle not to forget any key element of his list of major contributions. (I will come back to this article when emotions abate, and will add a proper bibliography of the corresponding Wirth publications.) He showed that it was possible to bring order to the world of machine-level programming through his introduction of the PL/360 structured assembly language for the IBM 360 architecture. He explained top-down design (“stepwise refinement“), as no one had done before, in a beautiful article that forever made the eight-queens problem famous. While David Gries had in his milestone book Compiler Construction for Digital Computers established compiler design as a systematic discipline, Wirth showed that compilers could be built simply and elegantly through recursive descent. That approach had a strong influence on language design, as will be discussed below in relation to Pascal.

The emphasis simplicity and elegance carried over to his book on compiler construction. Another book with the stunning title Algorithms + Data Structures = Programs presented a clear and readable compendium of programming and algorithmic wisdom, collecting the essentials of what was known at the time.

And then, of course, the programming languages. Wirth’s name will forever remained tied to Pascal, a worldwide success thanks in particular to its early implementations (UCSD Pascal, as well as Borland Pascal by his former student Philippe Kahn) on microcomputers, a market that was exploding at just that time. Pascal’s dazzling spread was also helped by another of Wirth’s trademark concise and clear texts, the Pascal User Manual and Report, written with Kathleen Jensen. Another key component of Pascal’s success was the implementation technique, using a specially designed intermediate language, P-Code, the ancestor of today’s virtual machines. Back then the diversity of hardware architectures was a major obstacle to the spread of any programming language; Wirth’s ETH compiler produced P-Code, enabling anyone to port Pascal to a new computer type by writing a translator from P-Code to the appropriate machine code, a relatively simple task.

Here I have a confession to make: other than the clear and simple keyword-based syntax, I never liked Pascal much. I even have a snide comment in my PhD thesis about Pascal being as small, tidy and exciting as a Swiss chalet. In some respects, cheekiness aside, I was wrong, in the sense that the limitations and exclusions of the language design were precisely what made compact implementations possible and widely successful. But the deeper reason for my lack of enthusiasm was that I had fallen in love with earlier designs from Wirth himself, who for several years, pre-Pascal, had been regularly churning out new language proposals, some academic, some (like PL/360) practical. One of the academic designs I liked was Euler, but I was particularly keen about Algol W, an extension and simplification of Algol 60 (designed by Wirth with the collaboration of Tony Hoare, and implemented in PL/360). I got to know it as a student at Stanford, which used it to teach programming. Algol W was a model of clarity and elegance. It is through Algol W that I started to understand what programming really is about; it had the right combination of freedom and limits. To me, Pascal, with all its strictures, was a step backward. As an Algol W devotee, I felt let down.
Algol W played, or more precisely almost played, a historical role. Once the world realized that Algol 60, a breakthrough in language design, was too ethereal to achieve practical success, experts started to work on a replacement. Wirth proposed Algol W, which the relevant committee at IFIP (International Federation for Information Processing) rejected in favor of a competing proposal by a group headed by the Dutch computer scientist (and somewhat unrequited Ph.D. supervisor of Edsger Dijkstra) Aad van Wijngaarden.

Wirth recognized Algol 68 for what it was, a catastrophe. (An example of how misguided the design was: Algol 68 promoted the concept of orthogonality, roughly stating that any two language mechanisms could be combined. Very elegant in principle, and perhaps appealing to some mathematicians, but suicidal: to make everything work with everything, you have to complicate the compiler to unbelievable extremes, whereas many of these combinations are of no use whatsoever to any programmer!) Wirth was vocal in his criticism and the community split for good. Algol W was a casualty of the conflict, as Wirth seems to have decided in reaction to the enormity of Algol 68 that simplicity and small size were the cardinal virtues of a language design, leading to Pascal, and then to its modular successors Modula and Oberon.

Continuing with my own perspective, I admired these designs, but when I saw Simula 67 and object-oriented programming I felt that I had come across a whole new level of expressive power, with the notion of class unifying types and modules, and stopped caring much for purely modular languages, including Ada as it was then. A particularly ill-considered feature of all these languages always irked me: the requirement that every module should be declared in two parts, interface and implementation. An example, in my view, of a good intention poorly realized and leading to nasty consequences. One of these consequences is that the information in the interface part inevitably gets repeated in the implementation part. Repetition, as David Parnas has taught us, is (particularly in the form of copy-paste) the programmer’s scary enemy. Any change needs to be checked and repeated in both the original and the duplicate. Any bug needs to be fixed in both. The better solution, instead of the interface-implementation separation, is to write everything in one place (the class of object-oriented programming) and then rely on tools to extract, from the text, the interface view but also many other interesting views abstracted from the text.

In addition, modular languages offer one implementation for each interface. How limiting! With object-oriented programming, you use inheritance to provide a general version of an abstraction and then as many variants as you like, adding them as you see fit (Open-Closed Principle) and not repeating the common information. These ideas took me towards a direction of language design completely different from Wirth’s.

One of his principles in language design was that it should be easy to write a compiler — an approach that paid off magnificently for Pascal. I mentioned above the beauty of recursive-descent parsing (an approach which means roughly that you parse a text by seeing how it starts, deducing the structure that you expect to follow, then applying the same technique recursively to the successive components of the expected structure). Recursive descent will only work well if the language is LL (1) or very close to it. (LL (1) means, again roughly, that the first element of a textual component unambiguously determines the syntactic type of that component. For example the instruction part of a language is LL (1) if an instruction is a conditional whenever it starts with the keyword if, a loop whenever it starts with the keyword while, and an assignment variable := expression whenever it starts with a variable name. Only with a near-LL (1) structure is recursive descent recursive-decent.) Pascal was designed that way.

A less felicitous application of this principle was Wirth’s insistence on one-pass compilation, which resulted in Pascal requiring any use of indirect recursion to include an early announcement of the element — procedure or data type — being used recursively. That is the kind of thing I disliked in Pascal: transferring (in my opinion) some of the responsibilities of the compiler designer onto the programmer. Some of those constraints remained long after advances in hardware and software made the insistence on one-pass compilation seem obsolete.

What most characterized Wirth’s approach to design — of languages, of machines, of software, of articles, of books, of curricula — was his love of simplicity and dislike of gratuitous featurism. He most famously expressed this view in his Plea for Lean Software article. Even if hardware progress drives software progress, he could not accept what he viewed as the lazy approach of using hardware power as an excuse for sloppy design. I suspect that was the reasoning behind the one-compilation-pass stance: sure, our computers now enable us to use several passes, but if we can do the compilation in one pass we should since it is simpler and leaner.
As in the case of Pascal, this relentless focus could be limiting at times; it also led him to distrust artificial intelligence, partly because of the grandiose promises its proponents were making at the time. For many years indeed, AI never made it into ETH computer science. I am talking here of the classical, logic-based form of AI; I had not yet had the opportunity to ask Niklaus what he thought of the modern, statistics-based form. Perhaps the engineer in him would have mollified his attitude, attracted by the practicality and well-defined scope of today’s AI methods. I will never know.

As to languages, I was looking forward to more discussions; while I wholeheartedly support his quest for simplicity, size to me is less important than simplicity of the structure and reliance on a small number of fundamental concepts (such as data abstraction for object-oriented programming), taken to their full power, permeating every facet of the language, and bringing consistency to a powerful construction.

Disagreements on specifics of language design are normal. Design — of anything — is largely characterized by decisions of where to be dogmatic and where to be permissive. You cannot be dogmatic all over, or will end with a stranglehold. You cannot be permissive all around, or will end with a mess. I am not dogmatic about things like the number of compiler passes: why care about having one, two, five or ten passes if they are fast anyway? I care about other things, such as the small number of basic concepts. There should be, for example, only one conceptual kind of loop, accommodating variants. I also don’t mind adding various forms of syntax for the same thing (such as, in object-oriented programming, x.a := v as an abbreviation for the conceptually sound x.set_a (v)). Wirth probably would have balked at such diversity.

In the end Pascal largely lost to its design opposite, C, the epitome of permissiveness, where you can (for example) add anything to almost anything. Recent languages went even further, discarding notions such as static types as dispensable and obsolete burdens. (In truth C is more a competitor to P-Code, since provides a good target for compilers: its abstraction level is close to that of the computer and operating system, humans can still with some effort decipher C code, and a C implementation is available by default on most platforms. A kind of universal assembly language. Somehow, somewhere, the strange idea creeped into people’s minds that it could also be used as a notation for human programmers.)

In any case I do not think Niklaus followed closely the evolution of the programming language field in recent years, away from principles of simplicity and consistency; sometimes, it seems, away from any principles at all. The game today is mostly “see this cute little feature in my language, I bet you cannot do as well in yours!” “Oh yes I can, see how cool my next construct is!“, with little attention being paid to the programming language as a coherent engineering construction, and even less to its ability to produce correct, robust, reusable and extendible software.

I know Wirth was horrified by the repulsive syntax choices of today’s dominant languages; he could never accept that a = b should mean something different from b = a, or that a = a + 1 should even be considered meaningful. The folly of straying away from conventions of mathematics carefully refined over several centuries (for example by distorting “=” to mean assignment and resorting to a special symbol for equality, rather than the obviously better reverse) depressed him. I remain convinced that the community will eventually come back to its senses and start treating language design seriously again.

One of the interesting features of meeting Niklaus Wirth the man, after decades of studying from the works of Professor Wirth the scientist, was to discover an unexpected personality. Niklaus was an affable and friendly companion, and most strikingly an extremely down-to-earth person. On the occasion of the 2014 symposium we were privileged to meet some of his children, all successful in various walks of life: well-known musician in the Zurich scene, specialty shop owner… I do not quite know how to characterize in words his way of speaking (excellent) English, but it is definitely impossible to forget its special character, with its slight but unmistakable Swiss-German accent (also perceptible in German). To get an idea, just watch one of the many lecture videos available on the Web. See for example the videos from the 2014 symposium mentioned above, or this full-length interview recorded in 2018 as part of an ACM series on Turing Award winners.

On the “down-to-earth” part: computer scientists, especially of the first few generations, tend to split into the mathematician types and the engineer types. He was definitely the engineer kind, as illustrated by his hardware work. One of his maxims for a successful career was that there are a few things that you don’t want to do because they are boring or feel useless, but if you don’t take care of them right away they will come back and take even more of your time, so you should devote 10% of that time to discharge them promptly. (I wish I could limit that part to 10%.)

He had a witty, subtle — sometimes caustic — humor. Here is a Niklaus Wirth story. On the seventh day of creation God looked at the result. (Side note: Wirth was an atheist, which adds spice to the choice of setting for the story.) He (God) was pretty happy about it. He started looking at the list of professions and felt good: all — policeman, minister, nurse, street sweeper, interior designer, opera singer, personal trainer, supermarket cashier, tax collector… — had some advantages and some disadvantages. But then He got to the University Professor row. The Advantages entry was impressive: long holidays, decent salary, you basically get to do what you want, and so on; but the Disadvantages entry was empty! Such a scandalous discrepancy could not be tolerated. For a moment, a cloud obscured His face. He thought and thought and finally His smile came back. At that point, He had created colleagues.

When the computing world finally realizes that design needs simplicity, it will do well to go back to Niklaus Wirth’s articles, books and languages. I can think of only a handful of people who have shaped the global hardware and software industry in a comparable way. Niklaus Wirth is, sadly, sadly gone — and I still have trouble accepting that he will not show up for dinner, on Thursday or ever again — but his legacy is everywhere.

Short version: the full text of my Introduction to the Theory of Programming Languages book (second printing, 1991) is now available. This page has more details including the table of chapters, and a link to the PDF (3.3MB, 448 + xvi pages).

The book is a survey of methods for language description, particularly semantics (operational, translational, denotational, axiomatic, complementary) and also serves as an introduction to formal methods. Obviously it would be written differently today but it may still have its use.

A few days ago I released the Axiomatic Semantics chapter of the book, and the chapter introducing mathematical notations. It looked at the time that I could not easily  release the rest in a clean form, because it is impossible or very hard to use the original text-processing tools (troff and such). I could do it for these two chapters because I had converted them years ago for my software verification classes at ETH.

By perusing old files, however,  I realized that around the same time (early 2000s) I actually been able to produce PDF versions of the other chapters as well, even integrating corrections to errata  reported after publication. (How I managed to do it then I have no idea, but the result looks identical, save the corrections, to the printed version.)

The figures were missing from that reconstructed version (I think they had been produced with Brian Kernighan’s PIC graphical description language , which is even more forgotten today than troff), but I scanned them from a printed copy and reinserted them into the PDFs.

Some elements were missing from my earlier resurrection: front matter, preface, bibliography, index. I was able to reconstruct them from the original troff source using plain MS Word. The downside is that they are not hyperlinked; the index has the page numbers (which may be off by 1 or 2 in some cases because of reformatting) but not hyperlinks to the corresponding occurrences as we would expect for a new book. Also, I was not able to reconstruct the table of contents; there is only a chapter-level table of contents which, however, is hyperlinked (in other words, chapter titles link to the actual chapters). In the meantime I obtained the permission of the original publisher (Prentice Hall, now Pearson Education Inc.).

Here again is the page with the book’s description and the link to the PDF:

bertrandmeyer.com/ITPL

My adjectives: timid, arrogant, insufferable.

My adverbs: (just one in fact) inadvertently

My gerunds: painstaking, running away, whining

My verbs: irritate, disappoint

My prepositions: notwithstanding, in spite of, away from

My conjunction: even though

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, that the writer would have known them. I never knew the protagonists of my chronicle. But my sister and I — along with a dear cousin, and I hope her children and grandchildren — are among the few people who still know they existed. Hence the need for a tribute lest the last traces of their stay on earth vanish forever.

They were German: Louis Bernheimer, born on 5 December 1875 in Issenhausen in Alsace, then part of Germany, and his wife Paola, born in Bayreuth on 12 February 1879, yes, that same Bayreuth where Wagner had premièred his quintessential German opera, Das Rheingold, three years before. They were German and seemingly, as we shall see, very German.

I know little about them, nothing else in fact than reported in this little note. One thing I do know is the nickname by which people in Paris called them behind their backs: “Mr. and Mrs. Bei Uns”. I know it because my father mentioned it to me. Just once, a long time ago, but I remember.

We need a bit of context. Herr und Frau Bernheimer flew Nazi Germany in the thirties with their son Fred, a young professional photographer, and settled to a safe place, or a place they thought was safe: Paris. There Fred met my father’s sister Éliane and married her; they had two children, my cousins. Now we are talking about the only people in this story whom I did know. Éliane was a strong personality, a dedicated feminist and activist. When her husband was hit with cancer and she abruptly found herself a widow with two young children and no resources, she took over his photography studio, learned the trade — about which she had known nothing — and made the business prosper. After the war, Studio Bernheim (the name shortened so that it would sound less German) became one of the fashionable addresses in Paris, thanks to both Éliane and her son Marc who trained himself to become its chief photographer while still a teenager.

Bei uns in German means the same as “chez nous” in French and translates as “at our home”, although that is not a good translation because English lacks a preposition that would accurately reflect the French “chez” or (in that sense) the German “bei”, which mean something like “in the home of”.  “Home” in a very intense and cozy sense, not just the physical house, but encompassing culture, country, community. Russians similarly say “U Nas”, literally “at ours” and, when talking about people, “Nashi”, literally “ours”, our people that is. In a Chekhov novella entitled  A boring story (full text available online here), when the antisemitic narrator wants to mention that at the theater last night the person seated in front of him was a Jew, he says that he was sitting behind an “iz nasikh”, a deformation with a fake Jewish accent of “iz nashikh”, one from our own, to suggest — ironically in light of the rest of my own boring story — a member of a tightly knit community.

It seems that the Bernheimers (to come back to them) were seen by their new extended family as stuffy Germans fitting the stereotypes. Not just stuffy: critical. Apparently, they went around commenting that whatever was being done in their new French surroundings was not being done right, and explaining the way it was done back home, “bei uns”. If so, it was perhaps not the best way to ingratiate themselves with their hosts, and it is not surprising that people in the family started referring to them acerbically, according to my father, as Mr. and Mrs. Bei Uns.

As noted, I never knew the Bernheimers, although in a different turn of the story I would — I should — have known them as a child. Therefore I cannot guess whether I would have yielded to family opinions and found them insufferable, or liked them as delightful, exotic older relatives having gone through hard times and now doting on their children, grandchildren, nephews and nieces. Maybe both. I feel a certain remote sympathy for them in any case, having probably been resented, like anyone who has lived in countries where people insist on the “korrekt” way of doing things and comes back to more lackadaisical cultures, as a bit of a Mr. Bei Uns myself.

The irony is that in the eyes of many people, including many who would never consider themselves antisemites, Jews still have the reputation of harboring a feeling of  solidarity with their own kin that transcends borders and trumps national allegiance. Here we have the reverse. Highly assimilated families on both sides, French Jews and German Jews, getting into a cultural conflict because some were French and some were German. Ever since the revolution emancipated French Jews, they have been passionately French. German Jews were just as passionately German (in the style of Heinrich Heine’s I think of Germany in the night, the poem entitled Nachtgedanken, written in exile in Paris, see its text here).  French Jews do not ask themselves how French their are, since their Frenchness is as obvious to them as the air they breathe; it’s others who want them to prove it again and again — something that no one ever seems to require of people from certain regions of France such as Brittany whose inhabitants have a loudly proclaimed attachment to their terroir of origin. Unbelievably, the question still resurfaces regularly; it is even a theme in the current presidential campaign.

Why did I never get to decide by myself who Mr. and Mrs. Bei Uns really were: chauvinistic scolds, or a charming old-world couple? If they thought of themselves as German, as part of “uns”, the “uns” ruling Germany had a different understanding. When Germany invaded France in 1940, the Bernheimers flew, like many others, to the South of France, which until 1942 remained a supposedly “free” zone. Then the Germans invaded the “free” zone too. In August of 1943 Mr. and Mrs Bei Uns were rounded up near Bayonne. The town is close to the Spanish border; I do not know if they had hoped to cross over, as others managed to do. They were interned in the Mérignac camp, where Bordeaux airport lies today. From Bordeaux they were transferred to the infamous camp at Drancy, near Paris. From there they were put on convoy number 26 to Auschwitz, where they were murdered.

“We’re a group of cousins aged 8-14 who” got “the idea to help others, since we know we are not alone”. They are providing mostly free tutoring to other kids. Details here.

For some time I have been nudging (yes, I am that kind of person) two young boys in my family, two cousins who are both learning the piano, to try Schubert’s delightful (and not very military) Marche Militaire together. With not much success until recently… but now they are stuck in their (neighboring) homes, and here is what comes out:

Click here

OK, not quite Horowitz and Rubinstein yet… (When the Carnegie Hall recital comes — will there ever be concerts at Carnegie Hall again? — I promise to post the announcement here with an offer for discounted tickets.) But I hope that in these trying times for all of us it brightens your day as it does not cease to brighten mine.

(Note added 21 March: there is already a complete and better rehearsed version — I have updated the above link to point to it.)

Sign seen in a Singapore shopping center:

Let us make sure we understand: here children are not allowed, but playing is.

As a consequence such playing must be performed by non-children only. Adults welcome to play!

Maybe it is actually not the intended meaning.  Instead of

(and (not (allowed children)) (allowed playing))

the desired parsing may be

(not (allowed (playing children)))

One hint in favor of this second interpretation is that in practice people seldom put up signs to advertise that something is allowed.

So new-line must be a mere break character equivalent to space, not a semantics-carrying delimiter.

Somewhat reminiscent of eats shoots and leaves. Here it is not even a punctuation mark, just a humble new-line, but its visual effect is strong all the same.

Imagine having had coffee, over the years, with each of Euclid, Galileo, Descartes, Marie Curie, Newton, Einstein, Lise Leitner, Planck and de Broglie. For a computer scientist, if we set aside the founding generation (the Turings and von Neumanns), the equivalent is possible. I have had the privilege of meeting and in some cases closely interacting with pioneer scientists, technologists and entrepreneurs, including Nobel, Fields and Turing winners, Silicon-Valley-type founders and such. It is only fair that I should share some of the traits I have observed in them.

Clarification and disclaimer:

• This discussion is abstract and as a result probably boring because I am not citing anyone by name (apart from a few famous figures, most of whom are dead and none of whom I have met). It would be more concrete and lively if I buttressed my generalities by actual examples, of which I have many. The absence of any name-dropping is a matter of courtesy and respect for people who have interacted with me unguardedly as a colleague, not a journalist preparing a tell-all book. I could of course cite the names for positive anecdotes only, but that would bias the story (see point 4). So, sorry, no names (and I won’t relent even if you ask me privately — mumm like a fish).
• I am looking at truly exceptional people. They are drawn from a more general pool of brilliant, successful scientists and technologists, of which they form only a small subset. Many of their traits also apply to this more general community and to highly successful people in any profession. What interests me is the extra step from brilliant to exceptional. It would not be that difficult to identify fifty outstanding mathematics researchers in, say, 1900, and analyze their psychological traits. The question is: why are some of them Hilbert and Poincaré, and others not?
• Of course I do not even begin to answer that question. I only offer a few personal remarks.
• More generally, cargo cult does not work. Emulating every one of the traits listed below will not get you a Nobel prize. You will not turn into a great composer by eating lots of Tournedos Rossini. (Well, you might start looking like the aging Rossini.) This note presents some evidence; it does not present any conclusion, let alone advice. Any consequence is for you to draw, or not.
• The traits obviously do not universally characterize the population observed. Not all of the people exhibit all of the traits. On the other hand, my impression is that most exhibit most.

1 Idiosyncratic

“Idiosyncratic” is a high-sounding synonym for “diverse,” used here to deflect the ridicule of starting a list of what is common to those people by stating that they are different from each other. The point is important, though, and reassuring. Those people come in all stripes, from the stuffy professor to the sandals-shorts-and-Hawaiian-shirt surfer.  Their ethnic backgrounds vary. And (glad you asked) some are men and some are women.

Consideration of many personality and lifestyle features yields no pattern at all. Some of the people observed are courteous, a delight to deal with, but there are a few jerks too. Some are voluble, some reserved. Some boastful, some modest. Some remain for their full life married to the same person, some have been divorced many times, some are single. Some become CEOs and university presidents, others prefer the quieter life of a pure researcher. Some covet honors, others are mostly driven by the pursuit of knowledge. Some wanted to become very rich and did, others care little about money.  It is amazing to see how many traits appear irrelevant, perhaps reinforcing the value of those that do make a difference.

2 Lucky

In trying to apply a cargo-cult-like recipe, this one would be the hardest to emulate. We all know that Fleming came across penicillin thanks to a petri dish left uncleaned on the window sill; we also know that luck favors only the well-prepared: someone other than Fleming would have grumbled at the dirtiness of the place and thrown the dish into the sink. But I am not just talking about that kind of luck. You have to be at the right place at the right time.

Read the biographies, and you will see that almost always the person happened to study with a professor who just then was struggling with a new problem, or did an internship in a group that had just invented a novel technique, or heard about recent results before everyone else did.

Part of what comes under “luck” is luck in obtaining the right education. Sure, there are a few autodidacts, but most of the top achievers studied in excellent institutions.

Success comes from a combination of nature and nurture. The perfect environment, such as a thriving laboratory or world-class research university, is not enough; but neither is individual brilliance. In most cases it is their combination that produces the catalysis.

3 Smart

Laugh again if you wish, but I do not just mean the obvious observation that those people were clever in what they did. In my experience they are extremely intelligent in other ways too. They often possess deep knowledge beyond their specialties and have interesting conversations.

You approach them because of the fame they gained in one domain, and learn from them about topics far beyond it.

4 Human

At first, the title of this section is another cause for ridicule: what did you expect, extraterrestrials? But “human” here means human in their foibles too. You might expect, if not an extraterrestrial, someone of the oracle-of-Delphi or wizard-on-a-mountain type, who after a half-hour of silence makes a single statement perfect in its concision and exactitude.

Well, no. They are smart, but they say foolish things too. And wrong things. Not only do they say them, they even publish them. (Newton wasted his brilliance on alchemy. Voltaire — who was not a scientist but helped promote science, translating Newton and supporting the work of Madame du Châtelet — wasted his powerful wit to mock the nascent study of paleontology: so-called fossils are just shells left over by picnicking tourists! More recently, a very famous computer scientist wrote a very silly book — of which I once wrote, fearlessly, a very short and very disparaging review.)

So what? It is the conclusion of the discussion that counts, not the meanderous path to it, or the occasional hapless excursion into a field where your wisdom fails you. Once you have succeeded, no one will care how many wrong comments you made in the process.

It is fair to note that the people under consideration probably say fewer stupid things than most. (The Erich Kästner ditty from an earlier article applies.) But no human, reassuringly perhaps, is right 100% of the time.

What does set them apart from many people, and takes us back to the previous trait (smart), is that even those who are otherwise vain have no qualms recognizing  mistakes in their previous thinking. They accept the evidence and move on.

5 Diligent

Of two people, one an excellent, top-ranked academic, the other a world-famous pioneer, who is the more likely to answer an email? In my experience, the latter.

Beyond the folk vision of the disheveled, disorganized, absent-minded professor lies the reality of a lifetime of rigor and discipline.

This should not be a surprise. There is inspiration, and there is perspiration.  Think of it as the dual of the  broken-windows theory, or of the judicial view that a defendant who lies in small things probably lies in big things: the other way around, if you do huge tasks well, you probably do small tasks well too.

6 Focused

Along with diligence comes focus, carried over from big matters to small matters. It is the lesser minds that pretend to multiplex. Great scientists, in my experience, do not hack away at their laptops during talks, and they turn off their cellphones. They choose carefully what they do (they are deluged with requests and learn early to say no), but what they accept to do they do. Seriously, attentively, with focus.

A fascinating spectacle is a world-famous guru sitting in the first row at a conference presentation by a beginning Ph.D. student, and taking detailed notes. Or visiting an industrial lab and quizzing a junior engineer about the details of the latest technology.

For someone who in spite of the cargo cult risk is looking for one behavior to clone, this would be it. Study after study has shown that we only delude ourselves in thinking we can multiplex. Top performers understand this. In the seminar room, they are not the ones doing email. If they are there at all, then watch and listen.

7 Eloquent

Top science and technology achievers are communicators. In writing, in speaking, often in both.

This quality is independent from their personal behavior, which can cover the full range from shy to boisterous.  It is the quality of being articulate. They know how to convey their results — and often do not mind crossing the line to self-advertising. It is not automatically the case that true value will out: even the most impressive advances need to be pushed to the world.

The alternative is to become Gregor Mendel: he single-handedly discovered the laws of genetics, and was so busy observing the beans in his garden that no one heard about his work until some twenty years after his death. Most of us prefer to get the recognition earlier. (Mendel was a monk, so maybe he believed in an afterlife; yet again maybe he, like everyone else, might have enjoyed attracting interest in this world first.)

In computer science it is not surprising that many of the names that stand out are of people who have written seminal books that are a pleasure to read. Many of them are outstanding teachers and speakers as well.

8 Open

Being an excellent communicator does not mean that you insist on talking. The great innovators are excellent listeners too.

Some people keep talking about themselves. They exist in all human groups, but this particular trait is common among scientists, particularly junior scientists, who corner you and cannot stop telling you about their ideas and accomplishments. That phenomenon is understandable, and in part justified by an urge to avoid the Mendel syndrome. But in a conversation involving some less and some more recognized professionals it is often the most accomplished members of the group who talk least. They are eager to learn. They never forget that the greatest insighs can start with a casual observation from an improbable source. They know when to talk, and when to shut up and listen.

Openness also means intellectual curiosity, willingness to have your intellectual certainties challenged, focus on the merit of a comment rather than the commenter’s social or academic status, and readiness to learn from disciplines other than your own.

9 Selfish

People having achieved exceptional results were generally obsessed with the chase and the prey. They are as driven as an icebreaker ship in the Sea of Barents. They have to get through; the end justifies the means; anything in the way is collateral damage.

So it is not surprising, in the case of academics, to hear colleagues from their institutions mumble that X never wanted to do his share, leaving it to others to sit in committees, teach C++ to biology majors and take their turn as department chair. There are notable exceptions, such as the computer architecture pioneer who became provost then president at Stanford before receiving the Turing Award. But  you do not achieve breakthroughs by doing what everything else is doing. When the rest of the crowd is being sociable and chatty at the conference party long into the night, they go back to their hotel to be alert for tomorrow’s session. A famous if extreme case is Andrew Wiles, whom colleagues in the department considered a has-been, while he was doing the minimum necessary to avoid trouble while working secretly and obsessively to prove Fermat’s last theorem.

This trait is interesting in light of the soothing discourse in vogue today. Nothing wrong with work-life balance, escaping the rat race, perhaps even changing your research topic every decade (apparently the rule in some research organizations). Sometimes a hands-off, zen-like attitude will succeed where too much obstination would get stuck. But let us not fool ourselves: the great innovators never let go of the target.

10. Generous

Yes, selfishness can go with generosity. You obsess over your goals, but it does not mean you forget other people.

Indeed, while there are a few solo artists in the group under observation, a striking feature of the majority is that in addition to their own achievements they led to the creation of entire communities, which often look up to them as gurus. (When I took the comprehensive exam at Stanford, the first question was what the middle initial “E.” of a famous professor stood for. It was a joke question, counting for maybe one point out of a hundred, helpfully meant to defuse students’ tension in preparation for the hard questions that followed. But what I remember is that every fellow student whom I asked afterwards knew the answer. Me too. Such was the personality cult.) The guru effect can lead to funny consequences, as with the famous computer scientist whose disciples you could spot right away in conferences by their sandals and beards (I do not remember how the women coped), carefully patterned after the master’s.

The leader is often good at giving every member of that community flattering personal attention. In a retirement symposium for a famous professor, almost every person I talked too was proud of having developed a long-running, highly personal and of course unique relationship with the honoree. One prestigious computer scientist who died in the 80’s encouraged and supported countless young people in his country; 30 years later, you keep running into academics, engineers and managers who tell you that they owe their career to him.

Some of this community-building can be self-serving and part of a personal strategy for success. There has to be more to it, however. It is not just that community-building will occur naturally as people discover the new ideas: since these ideas are often controversial at first, those who understood their value early band together to defend them and support their inventor. But there is something else as well in my observation: the creators’ sheer, disinterested generosity.

These people are passionate in their quest for discovery and creation and genuinely want to help others. Driven and self-promoting they may be, but the very qualities that led to their achievements — insight, intellectual courage, ability to think beyond accepted ideas — are at the antipodes of pettiness and narrow-mindedness. A world leader cannot expect any significant personal gain from spotting and encouraging a promising undergraduate, telling a first-time conference presenter that her idea is great and worth pushing further, patiently explaining elementary issues to a beginning student, or responding to a unknown correspondent’s emails. And still, as I have observed many times, they do all of this and more, because they are in the business of advancing knowledge.

These are some of the traits I have observed. Maybe there are more but, sorry, I have to go now. The pan is sizzling and I don’t like my tournedos too well-done.

(Originally published on CACM blog.)

To buy a Zurich Opera ticket online you have to register on their site, including choosing a form of address from a list which beats any I have seen:

As a side detail, their system does not work: to enable registration and booking it is supposed to send you an email with your password, and it never did in spite of many attempts over several days. The only way to buy tickets turned out to be going to the theater and queuing at the box office. (There I was assured with extreme politeness that I am now registered on the site, but no, never got a password and cannot log in.) I agree with you, though: what a trivial quibble! You may never be able to book a performance, but by clicking the right menu entry you can call yourself Frau Stadträtin.

Every Mozart study states that his last Symphony, “Jupiter” (Köchel 551), is one of humankind’s greatest musical achievements. Every description of the symphony indicates that the first movement borrows a theme from a concert aria. Every one that I have read expresses surprise at this self-borrowing and states that the reason for it is a complete mystery. I think I know that reason.

The theme as it appears in the symphony begins like this:

Click to listen [1]:

That theme is taken from the development of the short concert aria Un Bacia di Mano (A Handkiss) (K 451):

Hear it [2]:

The words sung on this theme are only part of the text, but they are the important part, emphasized and several times repeated:

Voi siete un po’ tondo
Mio caro Pompeo
L’usanze del mondo
Andate a studiar

meaning (my translation):

You are a bit of a simpleton,
My dear Pompeo.
Time for you to get out
And learn the ways of the world.

(Note to my Italian friends: yes, the Italian text  says “tondo”, not “tonto”. It may sound strange to you but apparently that’s how they talked in the settecento. The text, by the way, is attributed, although with no certainty, to Lorenzo Da Ponte.)

(Note to my American friends: yes, the current director of the CIA happens to be called “Pompeo”. From what I read in the news he could benefit from the advice. But let us not digress.)

What is this aria? It belongs to the “interpolated aria” genre, in which a composer would reuse the words of an air from an existing opera and set them to new music. Avoids having to ask a librettist for a new text, pleases singers by giving them bravura pieces, and undoubtedly for Mozart offers an excellent way to show the world how much more he could do, with the same words, than your average court composer. The text to Un bacio di mano originally came from an opera by Pasquale Anfossi.  The context of the aria is standard 18/19-th comedy fare: mock advice to an old man wanting to take a young spouse (as in Donizetti’s Don Pasquale).

All the Mozart biographies and analyses sound puzzled. Why in the world would Mozart, in one of his most momentous and majestic works, his last symphony, also the longest, insert a hint to an aria with such a lowbrow, almost silly subject? Here (from countless examples) is the kind of explanation you read:

Why risk interpolating yet another tune into the concatenation of ideas that he’s already given his listeners, and asked his orchestra to dramatize; and a melody, what’s more, that comes from a different expressive world, the low comedy of opera buffa as opposed to high-minded symphonic discussion? Mozart puts the whole structure of this movement on the line, seemingly for the sake of a compositional joke. It’s a piece of postmodernism avant la lettre, and the kind of thing that Beethoven, for all his iconoclasm, hardly risked in the same way in his symphonies.

Nonsense. Mozart liked jokes, but to think of him as some kind of dodecaphonist putting in random inserts is absurd. He would not include a gratuitous joke in a major work. “Postmodernism avant la lettre”, what is that supposed to mean? Some of the other commenters at least have the honesty to admit that they do not have a clue.

The clue is not so hard to find if you look at the words. In the aria already, the four lines cited break out seemingly from nowhere and through their repetition soar on their own, far above the triviality of the rest of the text. Mozart wanted to showcase this theme of urging a naïve man to get out and learn how the world works. And now, just a few weeks later — the aria is from June 1788, the symphony from July or August  — Mozart is broke, he just lost a child, his wife is sick, he has to beg his friend Puchberg for money, his stardom as a boy wonder is long gone, audiences (he thinks) have moved on, no one truly recognizes his genius. Other, more docile composers have decent, stable positions with a prince here or a duke there, and he who wanted to play the proud independent artist can hardly feed his family. He could have been organist at Versailles, and turned down the position [4] as beneath him; which it was, but at least it was a position. Here he is, the greatest genius of musical history, composing a symphony like no one else could even conceive of, and he sits alone in his derelict study with his wife coughing next door. He may not want to admit it, but deep down he feels that he has not long to live. Not one for self-pity, he looks sarcastically at his hungry self: you poor naïve soul, you never wanted to be a mere Anfossi or Salieri, and so you did not condescend to bow and smile humbly and flatter like everyone else did. You were so far above the rest of them that sooner or later the world was going to give you the recognition you deserve. Now this dirty attic. You are a bit of a simpleton, my dear Wolfie. Isn’t it time you got out, and learned the ways of the world?

That is the logical and human explanation. Do not ask for historical proof; it is a conjecture. But listen to the music, think of Wolfgang Amadeus in his mansard, read the words, and it will dawn on you too that this was what he meant when quoting his own looney tune.

Notes and references

[1] From Mackerras (Scottish Chamber Orchestra) performance here (first movement only). More performances (complete symphony) here.

[2] From the Bryn Terfel performance here. See more performances here. One is by José van Dam, of whom I am generally a great fan, but here I find the tempo too slow; same for the Thomas Hampson version. The Fischer-Dieskau recording is not what one would expect. Note that the aria is originally for a bass but most of these performances are by barytones (which is fine too). The Jardin des Voix (William Christie) video is fun.

[3] Symphony guide: Mozart’s 41st , see here.

[4] See e.g. here from Mozart, by Robert Gutman. Think of the effect on the later history of French music if he had been of a different mind!

On display in the exhibition mentioned in the previous article is a citation, from Urmanche’s writings, of an aphorism by Qol Ghali (who, as I did not know, was a medieval Muslim Volga poet). It reads [1]:

Emerald is a stone
But not every stone is an emerald
And not everyone can distinguish emerald from stone

This sounds like an excellent way to extend my new-year greetings and wishes to the esteemed readers of this blog. May you, throughout 2018, have the wisdom to distinguish emeralds [2] from stones.

Notes

[1] Изумруд — камень. Но не каждый камень изумруд. И не каждый человек может отличить изумруд от камня. (Already a translation, since the original must be in some ancient Turkic language.)

[2] Not that (mentioning this to avoid any confusion) I am specifically wishing you any Ruby.

There is currently in Kazan an exhibition of the works of the Tatar painter Baki Urmanche (1897-1990). One of his early drawings is entitled “The painter, the muse, and death” [1]:

It makes a good point. Not just about painters.

Note

[1] Художник, муза и смерть. The first word means “artist” but also, more specifically, “painter”, which Urmanche was (although he occasionally dabbled in other arts), so either translation is possible.

… at my would-be coauthors, would someone please tell them, and every non-native-English-speaker-but-aspiring-English-author, to read this? Please, please, please, please, please.

In English the verb “allow” cannot take an infinitive as a complement. Ever. You may not write “my method allows to improve productivity” (even if it’s true, which it probably isn’t, but never mind). Ever. You may write the equivalent in French, German, Russian, Italian and whatever, but not in English. Ever. In English you do not “allow to” do something. Ever. You allow someone or something to do something. Maybe, or maybe not, your method allows its users to improve productivity. That’s correct English. It is also OK to use a gerund [1]: your method allows improving productivity. Actually that sounds clumsy but at least it is grammatically correct.

The reason the gerund does not sound quite right here is that  in situations where foreign speakers instinctively think “allow to…” in their mother tongues and transport it directly to English, the native English speaker instinctively comes up with  something  different. Typically, one of:

• Allow someone to, using a specific word instead of “someone”. The English language has a concrete slant and favors expressing all details, including some that in other languages remain implicit.
• Make it possible to:  a bit wordy, but common and convenient, and definitely correct when followed by an infinitive (“my method makes it possible to improve productivity”). We politely leave it unsaid what the “it” is that is being made possible. This turn of phrase is the easiest if you want to remain as close to the original “allow to…” in your native language. Consider “make it possible to” as a mechanical translation of “allow to”. It works.
• Support something. Remember this word. It is used more widely in English than its typical translations in other languages. Often it fits just where you initially would come up with “allow to”. Your method may support policies for improving productivity.
• The gerund. It will sound less clumsy if what you are “allowing” is truly a process, and you are using “allow” in its direct sense of giving permission [2], rather than in the more general and weaker sense of supporting. The rules of tennis allow playing in either singles or doubles.
• Generalizing the gerund, a plain noun (substantive). You can, in fact, allow something. Your methodology allows productivity improvements. Like the gerund, it does not sound as good as the other forms (“support” is better unless there truly is a notion of permission), but it is correct.
• Or… nothing at all. Paraphrased from a text seen recently: “some techniques only allow to model internal properties, others allow to model external properties too”. So much better (in any language): some techniques only model internal properties, others also cover external ones. Whoever wrote the first variant should not, in the next three years, be allowed anywhere near the word “allow”.

Some people go around the issue by using “allow for doing something”. That usage is acceptable in American English (less so in British English), but by default “allow for” means something else: tolerating some possible variation in an estimate, as in “plan two hours for your drive, allowing for traffic”. As a substitute for “allowing to” this phrase has no advantage over the solutions listed above.

On last count, I had corrected “allow to” in drafts from coworkers, using one of these solutions, approximately 5,843,944,027 times (allowing for a few cases that I might have forgotten). Enough! Please, please, please, please, please, please, please. Make a note of this. It will allow me to live better, it will allow you to avoid my wrath, it  will make it possible for us to work together again, it will support a better understanding among the people in the world, it will allow faster refereeing and a better peer review process, it covers all needs, and it still allows for human imperfection.

Notes

[1] Or gerundive, or present participle: a word form resulting from addition of the suffix “-ing” to a verb radical.

[2] Note that beyond “allow” this discussion also applies to the verb “permit”. You permit someone to do something.

[3] Post-publication, Oscar Nierstrasz mentioned on Facebook that he has a Web page addressing the same point.

(Reproduced from my CACM blog.)

One of the small pleasures of life is to win a technical argument with a graduate student. You feel good, as well you should. It is only human to be want to be right. Besides, if you ended up being wrong all or most of the time, you should start questioning your sanity: why are they the students and you the supervisor, rather than the other way around?

One of the big pleasures of life is to lose an argument with a graduate student. Then you have learned something.

Sometimes it is better not to know French. You will never quite get what Voltaire, Molière, Beauvoir, Zola, Hugo and Proust really mean and what Carmen and Faust really sing. But at least you will not find out what the Marseillaise really says. It is France’s national anthem and, according to a site dedicated to it, marseillaise.org, “believed by many to be the most stirring of all anthems“. Stirring, sure. Until you pay attention to the words.

I wrote an article on this blog, in French, proposing to shed the Marseillaise from its worst parts. A few people asked me to provide an English version; here it is. A rendition rather than a translation.

July the 14th, “Bastille day”, was France’s national holiday, and the opportunity for singing the Marseillaise. Politicians in towns large and small make a point of intoning it, in tune or (more often) out of it. One assumes — rather, one hopes — that occasionally they feel some embarrassment. You see, they understand French. The rest of the world hears the music, apparently good enough to have led such diverse composers as Rossini, Tchaikovsky, Schumann and Beethoven to cite it in their own works, and has the luxury of ignoring the words. Better so. Here are some of the gems (in my almost literal translation, all those I found on the Web are awful):

It’s us versus tyranny
We have raised our blood-stained flag

and

Do you hear, in the countryside,
The howling of these ferocious soldiers?
They come to snatch our sons and wives from our arms
And slit their throats

and the triumphal part of the chorus:

Let’s march, let’s march!
Let an impure blood
Soak the grooves of our fields!

So kind and welcoming.

What makes someone’s blood so impure that every patriot must take as his sacred duty to spill floods of it?

As a matter of fact, it happened, three quarters of a century ago. Hundreds of thousands of French people learned that their blood was now officially non-conformant. There are a few more episodes of that kind in the country’s history. They are not, to put it politely, the most glorious, and not the most appropriate to recall for celebration in the national anthem.

In the days before the festivities, hearing a 7-year old sing (in tune) the impure blood that must soak the grooves, I wondered what kind of thoughts such slogans can evoke among schoolchildren, who are instructed to memorize them and sing along. What about the blood-stained flag? What about the tyrants (Matteo Renzi? Mario Draghi?) who unleash on us their ferocious soldiers, not only to howl, but to snatch, from our arms, our sons and our wives, and slit their throats?

It is time to reform this racist and hateful song.

We need not quarrel about history. The song had a role. The revolution faced enemies, it was defending itself. When we commemorate that revolution today, we think not of Robespierre and the murder of Lavoisier (the creator of modern chemistry, whose executors famously explained that “the republic has no use for scientists“); we think of its message of liberty and fraternity. Enough blood, battles, ferocity. Sing what unites us today.

A national anthem should not, of course, be changed every year as a response to changes in fashion. By nature, it will always be a bit off. But after two hundred and thirteen years of existence, including one hundred and thirty-six of service as national anthem, it is time to shed the Marseillaise of the most shameful remnants of its original text. The music will stay; but the words must adapt to today’s France, which does not whine about a troubled past but looks forward to a bright future.

Only weak peoples seek unity only through the detestation of others. Their songs are full of rejection and negation. Strong peoples, for their part, invoke positive images. Which phrase better projects the proud attitude of a nation that believes in its destiny: “it’s us versus tyranny“, or “with us, marches democracy”? “Their impure blood” or “our pure hearts”? “Slit throats” or “admire”? Be the judge.

There have been proposals for alternative Marseillaises before, but they tend to be mirror images of the original, falling into their own excesses, such as a rabidly anti-militaristic version which can only exacerbate divisions. We will not gain anything by replacing ancient grievances by modern insults.

The following version, illustrated below by the first verse and the chorus (and given in a literal English translation not meant for singing, whereas the French text respects the prosody and versification of the original Marseillaise) pursues a different goal: not antagonizing people, but uniting them; highlighting not differences, but affinities; and allowing everyone to bellow it: with no shame; instead, with pride.

Children of the fatherland, come along
The day of glory has come
With us, marches democracy
We have raised our shining flag.
Do you hear, in the countryside,
The murmur of those envious peoples?
They come to our towns and mountains
And cannot stop admiring them.

(Chorus)

Together, citizens!
Let us make our union stronger!
Let our pure hearts
Vibrate in unison.

[This blog is normally in English, but today’s article is particularly relevant to French speakers. The topic: freeing a national anthem of its hateful overtones.]

Mardi dernier quatorze juillet, une fois de plus, la Marseillaise a retenti un peu partout. C’est le jour où les hommes politiques s’essayent à l’entonner, juste ou (plus souvent) faux. On peut s’imaginer, en fait on espère, qu’ils sont ici et là un peu gênés. “D’un sang impur, abreuve les sillons!“. Vraiment ? Qu’est-ce qui rend un sang si impur que tout bon patriote ait le devoir de le faire jaillir ?

Certes, c’est arrivé, il y a trois quarts de siècle, quand on a soudain avisé des centaines de milliers de Français que leur sang était désormais classé non conforme. Il y a quelques autres épisodes de ce genre dans l’histoire du pays ; ce ne sont pas — pour dire les choses poliment — les plus reluisants, et certainement pas ceux que le chant national devrait glorifier.

À entendre ces jours-ci une petite tête blonde de sept ans chanter (juste) le sang impur qui doit abreuver les sillons, je me suis demandé quelles pensées ces slogans pouvaient bien éveiller pour les enfants des écoles à qui l’on enjoint de les répéter en choeur. Et l’étendard sanglant ? Et les tyrans (Matteo Renzi ? Mario Draghi ?) qui nous envoient leurs féroces soldats non seulement mugir mais, jusque dans nos bras, égorger nos fils, nos compagnes?

Il est temps de réformer ce chant raciste et haineux. Qu’il ait joué son rôle n’est pas la question. La révolution avait ses ennemis, elle se défendait. Quand nous l’invoquons aujourd’hui, cette révolution, ce n’est pas à Robespierre et à l’assassinat de Lavoisier (la république n’a pas besoin de savants) que nous devrions faire appel, mais à son message de liberté et de fraternité. Assez de sang, de batailles, de férocité. Place à ce qui nous définit vraiment aujourd’hui.

Il ne s’agit pas de changer tous les ans d’hymne national en réponse aux modes. Il sera toujours, par nature, un peu déphasé. Mais après deux cent treize ans de Marseillaise, dont cent trente-six ans de service continu comme chant officiel du pays, il est temps de se séparer des relents les plus honteux de son texte d’origine. La musique restera, assez bonne pour avoir été reprise par Schumann, Tchaikowsky, Beethoven, Rossini et bien d’autres ; mais les paroles doivent être adaptées à ce qu’est la France moderne, tournée vers  l’avenir.

Seuls les peuples faibles ne savent s’unir qu’à travers la détestation des autres. Leurs chants sont emplis de rejets et de négations. Les peuples forts s’appuient, eux, sur des images positives. Quelle formule projette le mieux  l’attitude fière d’une nation confiante en son avenir : “contre nous, de la tyrannie“, ou “avec nous, la démocratie” ? “Un sang impur” ou “nos coeurs purs” ?  “Égorger” ou “admirer” ?Jugez-en.

Il existe des Marseillaises alternatives, mais souvent elles ne sont que le miroir de la première, avec leurs propres excès ; voir par exemple cette version sympathique de prime abord mais d’un anti-militarisme qui ne peut que diviser encore. Point n’est besoin de remplacer les anciens cris par des insultes nouvelles.

La version qui suit — chantable, respectant la métrique,  et dont je fournirai les autres couplets si elle provoque autre chose que des invectives — a un tout autre but : non pas diviser, mais réunir ; attiser non pas les différences mais les affinités ; et permettre à chacun de la chanter à pleine voix : sans honte ; au contraire, avec fierté.

Allons enfants de la patrie
Le jour de gloire est arrivé
Avec nous la démocratie
L’étendard vaillant est levé (bis)
Entendez-vous, dans les campagnes,
Frémir tous ces peuples envieux ?
Ils viennent, jusque sous nos cieux,
Admirer nos villes, nos montagnes.

(Refrain)

Ensemble, citoyens !
Renforçons notre union !
Que nos cœurs purs
Vibrent à l’unisson.

Résidence de l’ambassade de France, Berne, le 14 juillet 2015

Most people in technology, trade, research or education work in an international environment and need to use a foreign language which they learned at some earlier stage [1]. It is striking to see how awfully most of us perform. International conferences are a particular pain; many speakers are impossible to understand. You just want to go home and read the paper — or, often, not.

Teachers — English teachers in the case of the most commonly used international language — often get the blame, as in “They teach us Shakespeare’s English instead of what we need for today’s life“, but such complaints are  unfounded: look at any contemporary language textbook and you will see that it is all about some Svetlanas or Ulriches or Natsukos meeting or tweeting their friends Cathy and Bill.

It is true, though, that everyone teaches languages the wrong way.

There is only one way to teach languages right: start with the phonetics. Languages were spoken [2] millennia before they ever got written down. The basis of all natural languages is vocal. If you do not pronounce a language right you do not speak that language. It is unconscionable for example that most of us non-native speakers, when using English, still have an accent. We should have got rid of its last traces by age 12.

I cannot understand why people who are otherwise at the vanguard of intellectual achievement make a mess of their verbal expression, seemingly not even realizing there might be a problem. Some mistakes seem to be handed out from generation to generation. Most French speakers of English, for example, pronounce the “ow” of “allow” as in “low”, not “cow” (it took a long time before a compassionate colleague finally rid me of that particular mistake, and I don’t know how many more I may still be making); Italians seem to have a particular fondness for pronouncing as a “v” the “w” of “write”; an so on.

The only place I ever saw that taught languages right was a Soviet school for interpreters. Graduating students of French, having had no exposure to the language before their studies, spoke it like someone coming out of a Métro station. (Actually they spoke more like a grandmother coming out of the Métro, since they had little access to contemporary materials, but that would have been easy to fix.) The trick: they spent their entire first year doing phonetics, getting the “r”and the “u” and so on right, shedding the intonation of their native tongue. That year was solely devoted to audio practice in a phonetics lab. At the end of it they did not know the meaning of what they were saying,but they said it perfectly. Then came a year of grammar, then a year of conversation. Then came the Métro result. (This is not an apology of the Soviet Union. Someone there just happened to get that particular thing right.)

We should teach everyone this way. There is no reason to tolerate phonetic deviations. If you do not get the sounds exactly as they should be, everything else will be flawed. Take, for example, the “r”. If, like me, you cannot roll your “r”s, then when you try to speak Russian or Italian, even if you think you can get the other sounds right you don’t because  your tongue or palate or teeth are in the wrong place. Another example is the “th” sound in English (two distinct sounds in fact) which I never got right. I can fake it but then something else comes out wrong and I still sound foreign. My high-school teachers — to whom I owe gratitude for so much else — should have tortured me until my “th”s were perfect. True, teaching time is a fixed-pie problem, but I am sure something else could have been sacrificed. Since, for example, I can answer in a blink that seven times nine is sixty-three, I must at some stage have taken the time to memorize it. In retrospect I would gladly sacrifice that element of knowledge, which I can reconstruct when needed, for the ability to roll my “r”s.

Age is indeed critical. While we humans can learn anything at any time, it is a well-known fact (although the reasons behind it remain mysterious) that until puberty we are malleable and can learn languages perfectly.  Witness bilingual and trilingual children; they do not have any accent. But around the time we develop new abilities and desires our brain shuts itself off to that particular skill; from then on we can only learn languages at great pain, with only remote hopes of reaching the proficiency of natives. The time to learn the phonetics of a foreign language, and learn it perfectly, is around the age of nine or ten at the latest. Then, at the age of reason, we should learn the structures — the grammar. Declensions in German, the use of tenses in English, the perfective and imperfective aspects of Russian. Conversation — Svetlana greeting Cathy — can come later if there is time left. Once you have the basics wired into your head, the rest is trivial.

Focusing children on phonetics as the crucial part of learning a language will also help them shine. Like physical appearance, verbal clarity is an enormous advantage. I must not be the only one in conferences who pays far more attention to the content of an article if the speaker has impeccable pronunciation, innate or learned. Syntax and choice of words come next. Of course substance matters; we have all heard top scientists with accents thicker than a Humvee tire and grammar thinner than a summer dress.  Everyone else needs fluency.

Conceivably, someone might object that a year of phonetic drilling is not the most amusing pastime for a 10-year-old. Without even noting that it’s not worse than having to learn to play the violin — where did we ever get the idea that learning should be fun?

As to me, like those who before they die want to get into space, visit the capitals of all countries on earth or reach the top of Mount Everest, I have my dream; it has lesser impact on the environment and depends on me, not on the help of others: just once, I’d like to roll an “r” like a Polish plumber.

Notes

[1] Many native English speakers provide the exception to this observation, since they often do not learn any foreign language beyond “Buon giorno” and “melanzane alla parmigiana”, and hence will probably not see the point of this article.

[2] And motioned. Sign language as practiced by deaf people (informally before it was codified starting from the 17th century on) is also a potential teaching start.

In the process of finishing a book right now, it occurred to me that writing is really a simple matter. There are only three issues to address:

1. How to start.
2. How to finish.
3. How to take care of the stuff in-between.

In the early stages  (1) you face the anguish of the “empty paper, defended by its whiteness” (Mallarmé) and do not know where to begin. If you overcome it, you have all the grunt work to do (3), step after step. At the end (2), while deep down you feel you have done enough and should be permitted to  click “Publish”, you still have to fill the holes, which may be small in number but have remained holes for a reason: you have again and again delayed filling them because in reality you do not know what to write there.

All things considered, then, it is not such a big deal.

This is a plug for a family member, but for a good cause: reuse and the environment. There are many reasons for promoting reuse in software; in other fields some of those reasons apply too, plus many others, economic and environmental. The core concern is to reduce waste of all kinds.

One of the most appalling sources of waste is the growing use of throw-away food containers. It is also avoidable.

A new company, bizeebox [1], has devised an ingenious scheme to let restaurants use containers that can be washed and reused many times. It is easy to use by both restaurants and customers, saves money, and avoids heaping tons of waste on landfills. Their slogan: “Take the Waste Out of Takeout“.

The founders of bizeebox have run successful pilot projects and are now starting for real with restaurants in the Ann Arbor area. They have launched a campaign on Indiegogo, with a $30,000 funding goal. Reuse deserves a chance; so do they.

References

[1] bizeebox page, at bizeebox.com.

[2] bizeebox Indiegogo campaign: here.

I am giving my “inaugural lecture” at ITMO in Saint Petersburg tomorrow (Thursday, 28 February 2013) at 14 (2 PM) local time, meaning e.g. 11 AM in Western Europe and 2 AM (ouch!) in California. See here for the announcement. The title is “Programming: Magic, Art, Routine or Science?“. The talk will be streamed live: see here.

After several months of inaction I have updated my “Gallery of Computer Scientists” [1]. It benefits from many recent meetings where the density per square meter of Turing award winners and other brilliant computer scientists was hard to beat, most notably the two extraordinary Turing centenary celebrations  — the ACM event in San Francisco, and Andrei Voronkov’s Manchester conference — and our own LASER summer school of last September which brought together the Gotha of programming language designers. And I still have not included everyone.

I do not know of any photographic collection anywhere that compares to this archive in either quantity or quality of the scientists pictured. My only regret is that I did not start earlier (I missed several giants of the field, to soon departed, such as Dijkstra, Dahl and Nygaard, even though I had many occasions to photograph them). The truth is that I had got impatient with photography and started again only when digital cameras became widely available.

The quality of the pictures themselves varies. It is definitely higher in recent ones: I may have become a better photographer, but it does not hurt that I have more sophisticated cameras than the rudimentary point-and-shoot I was using at the beginning. I should also improve the layout of the page, although I hope you will appreciate the ability to move the cursor around to get large pictures without having to click and go to different pages.

I started this collection because it occurred to me that for a number of reasons I am, more than almost anyone I know, in the position of meeting outstanding people from many different sub-communities of software engineering and the rest of computer science: from program verification, semantics, languages, algorithms to architecture, management, empirical software engineering and many others. I realized that it would be unconscionable not to take advantage of these opportunities and do for computer scientists what Paul Halmos did for mathematicians [2].

Some of the people pictured are more famous than others, but all do interesting work. There is no profound logic to the choice of subjects; it obviously depends on the chances I get, but also on the time I can spend afterwards to sort through the shots (this is not a full-time job). So if you know I took a picture of you and you do not see it on the page, do not take offense: it may be a matter of time, or I may need another opportunity and a better shot.

All the pictures are by me. They are of different styles; I try to capture a personality and a mood. Many shots show a computer scientist in flagrante delicto: doing computer science, as when giving a talk, or engaging in a design discussion around a laptop. Some were taken in more informal settings, such as a long winter walk in the woods. A few reveal some humorous or fancy aspect of the subject’s personality. None has any context or explanation; I will not tell you, for example, why Tony Hoare had, on that day, two hats and two umbrellas. I think it is more fun to let you imagine.

Pictures are only pictures and what matters is the work that all these great people do. Still, I hope you will enjoy seeing what they look like.

References

[1] Bertrand Meyer’s Gallery of Computer Scientists, available here.
[2] Paul Halmos’s photo collection, see here.

A few years back my mother started writing her memoirs. She only completed a few chapters, hand-written, and I offered to type them up. There was not enough material to approach a publisher (my fault, for not pushing her to write more); the text has remained unpublished. I am making it available now: see here.

It is in French; if there is enough interest I will translate it. (Although the text is not very long, it is well written so the translation should be done carefully.) For reference I have included below the entry about my mother in one of many books about the period.

Here as a taste of her text is a translation of a short extract from chapter 5 (Grenoble, 1942, where her mission in the resistance network was to find safe havens for Jewish children):

 Along with hosting families there were religious boarding schools, and I should pay homage to a young Mother Superior, whose name I unfortunately forgot, who accepted some of our little girls cordially and without any afterthoughts. From schools for boys, however, how many rejections we had to suffer!

I also have to evoke that other Mother Superior, stern and dry, who after making me languish for several days while asking for the approval of her supervisors finally consented to see four or five little girls. I arrived with five of my charges, whom my neighbor had brought to me after their parents were arrested on that very morning. I can still see the high-ceilinged parlor, the crucifix on the wall, the freshly waxed and shining floor, the carefully polished furniture and a tiny figure with curly brown hair, all trembling: the eldest girl, who at the point of entering stepped back and burst into tears.  “One does not enter crying the house of the Holy Virgin Mary”, pronounced the Mother Superior, who had me take my little flock back to Grenoble, without further concerning herself with its fate.

And this note from the final chapter about the days of the Liberation of France, when under a false name she was working as a nurse for the Red Cross in the Limoges area:

This time it was the collaborationists’ turn to flee. I almost became a victim in a tragicomic incident when once, doing my daily rounds, I had to show my papers to a young FFI [members of the internal resistance army], aged maybe eighteen, who claimed the papers were fakes. Indeed they were: I still had not been able to re-establish my true identity. I tried to explain that as a Jew I had had to live under a borrowed name. He answered that by now all the “collabos” claimed to be Jewish to escape the wrath of the people…

 To understand the note that follows it is necessary to know a bit about the history of the period: the Drancy camp, OSE (see the Wikipedia entry), the Garel network. For the 100-th anniversary of OSE a documentary film was produced, featuring my mother among the interviewees; see a short reference to the movie here.

Biographical entry

From: Organisation juive de combat — Résistance / Sauvetage (Jewish Combat Organization: Resistance and Rescue), France 1940-1945, under the direction of Jean Brauman, Georges Loinger and Frida Wattenberg, Éditions Autrement, Paris, 2002.
Comments in brackets […] are by me (BM).

Name: Meyer née Kahn, Madeleine
Born 22 May 1914 in Paris
Resistance networks: Garel
Resistance period: from 1941 to the Liberation: Rivesaltes (Pyrénées-Orientales), Font-Romeu (Pyrénées-Orientales), Masgelier (Creuse), Lyons, Grenoble, Limoges
Supervisors: Andrée Salomon, Georges Garel

In July of 1942, Madeleine Kahn was sent by Andrée Salomon and Georges Garel to work at Rivesaltes [a horrendous “transit camp”, see here] as a social worker. She worked there for several weeks and helped improve the life of people interned there; she managed to extricate from the camp a number of children that she took to Perpignan and moved to several hosting places such as Font-Romeu and Le Masgelier. In Le Masgelier [a center that hosted Jewish children], she was assigned the mission of convoying to Marseilles, for emigration to the United States, Jewish children who were of foreign origin and hence in a particularly dangerous situation. [These were children from Jewish families that had fled Germany and Austria after Hitler’s accession to power and were particular sought by the Nazis.] The local authorities had put them up in the castle of Montgrand, already used as a hosting camp for elderly Austrian refugees. The Germans’ arrival  into the Southern half of France [until 1942 they were only occupying the Northern half of the country] abruptly stopped the departures for the US, and the authorities changed the children’s status to prisoners, held in appalling conditions. Madeleine Kahn remained alone with the children. All escape attempts failed. They were only freed after a long time, and sent back in some cases to their families and in others to Le Masgelier.

In November of 1942, Georges Garel and Andrée Salomon put Madeleine Kahn in charge of organizing the reception and hiding of children in the Isère area [the region around Grenoble], which by then was still part of the Italian-occupied zone. [Italian occupation was generally felt much lighter than the German one, in particular regarding persecution of Jews.] The mission was to find hosting families or religious institutions, catholic or protestant, and in advance of such placement to prepare the children to their new [false] identities and help separate them from their parents [when still alive and not deported]. It was also necessary to obtain the support of some authorities, such as Mme Merceron-Vicat from the child support administration and Sister Joséphine of Our Lady of Sion. After a while Madeleine was joined by Dr. Selinger and Herta Hauben, both of whom were eventually deported. Later on she collaborated with Fanny Loinger [another key name in the Jewish resistance], who for safety reasons took over in Isère and particularly in the Drôme.

After the departure of the Italians [and their replacement by the Germans], the situation became extremely dangerous and she had constantly to move the children around.

Warned that she was being tracked, Madeleine Kahn hurried to reclaim two babies that had been left in the La Tronche nursery. The director refused to give her Corinne, aged one, as earlier on three Germans had come for her, wanting to take her to Drancy [the collection point in France for the train convoys en route for Auschwitz], where her parents were being held. Upon seeing the child’s age, the Germans had left, announcing they would come back with a nurse. Instantly, Madeleine summons her friends in various [resistance] organizations and the process sets into motion: produce a fake requisition order in German with a fake seal stenciled from a war prisoner’s package; hire a taxi; make up a nurse’s uniform for Renée Schutz, German-born in Berlin as Ruth Schütz. Equipped with the requisition order, the false German nurse arrives at the nursery while Madeleine acts as a sentry to stop the Germans if needed. Corinne, the baby, is saved. [I became friends with her in the nineteen-seventies.]

The duped Germans were enraged. From an employee of the nursery they obtained Madeleine’s address, but she had left. The landlady gave them the address of Simone, Madeleine’s sister. [Simone was not a member of the network but knew all about it.] Interrogated under torture, she gave nothing away. All attempts to free her failed. She was deported to Auschwitz from where [adopting along the way an 8-year-old girl whose parents had already been deported, who clung to her, causing her to be treated like mothers with children, i.e. gassed immediately] she never returned.