Why not program right?






(Originally published on CACM blog.) Most of the world programs in a very strange way. Strange to me. I usually hear the reverse question: people ask us, the Eiffel community, to explain why we program our way. I hardly understand the question, because the only mystery is how anyone can even program in any other … Read more




Festina retro






We “core” computer scientists and software engineers always whine that our research themes forever prevent us, to the delight of our physicist colleagues but unjustly, from reaching the gold standard of academic recognition: publishing in Nature. I think I have broken this barrier now by disproving the old, dusty laws of physics! Brace yourself for … Read more




The end of software engineering and the last methodologist






(Reposted from the CACM blog [*].) Software engineering was never a popular subject. It started out as “programming methodology”, evoking the image of bearded middle-aged men telling you with a Dutch, Swiss-German or Oxford accent to repent and mend your ways. Consumed (to paraphrase Mark Twain) by the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, might actually … Read more




Blockchains, bitcoin and distributed trust: LASER school lineup complete






The full lineup of speakers at the 2018 LASER summer school on Software for Blockchains, Bitcoin and Distributed Trust is now ready, with the announcement of a new speaker, Primavera De Filippi from CNRS and Harvard on social and legal aspects. The other speakers are Christian Cachin (IBM), Maurice Herlihy (Brown), Christoph Jentzsch (slock.it), me, … Read more




Devops (the concept, and a workshop announcement)






One of the most significant recent developments in software engineering is the concept of Devops*. Dismissing the idea as “just the latest buzzword” would be wrong. It may be a buzzword but it reflects a fundamental change in the way we structure system development; with web applications in particular the traditional distinctions between steps of … Read more




Split the Root: a little design pattern






Many programs take “execution arguments” which the program users provide at the start of execution. In EiffelStudio you can enter them under Execution -> Execution parameters. The program can access them through the Kernel Library class ARGUMENTS. Typically, the root class of the system inherits from ARGUMENTS and its creation procedure will include something like … Read more




LASER summer school on software for robotics: last call for registration






Much of the progress in robotics is due to software advances, and software issues remain at the heart of the formidable challenges that remain. The 2017 LASER summer school, held in September in Elba, brings together some of the most prestigious international experts in the area. The LASER school has established itself as one of … Read more




The perils of feature interaction






One of the most delicate aspects of design is feature interaction. As users, we suffer daily from systems offering features that individually make sense but clash with each other. In my agile book [1] I explained in detail, building on the work of Pamela Zave, why this very problem makes one of the key ideas … Read more




AutoProof workshop: Verification As a Matter of Course






The AutoProof technology pursues the goal of “Verification As a Matter Of Course”, integrated into the EVE development environment. (The AutoProof  project page here; see particularly the online interactive tutorial.) A one-day workshop devoted to the existing AutoProof and current development will take place on October 1 near Toulouse in France. It is an informal … Read more




Robotics and concurrency






Many robotics applications are by nature concurrent; in his ongoing PhD work, Andrey Rusakov [1] is building a comprehensive concurrent robot programming framework, Roboscoop [2], based on the SCOOP model for simple concurrent object-oriented programming [3] and the Ros operating system. As part of this work it is important to know how much robotics applications … Read more