Bertrand Meyer's technology+ blog
Software engineering, programming methodology, languages, verification, general technology, publication culture, and more
Academic life includes self-governance and require people to sit in committees, take on various duties, serve as director of studies, graduate program director, chair of PhD chair of external relations, department vice chair or chair, dean… Not everyone wants to play. It is not rare to encounter faculty members who tell you bluntly that as … Read more
Reading notes. From: Quelques éléments d’histoire des nombres négatifs (Elements of a history of negative numbers) by Anne Boyé, Proyecto Pénélope, 2002, revision available here; On Solving Equations, Negative Numbers, and Other Absurdities: Part II by Ralph Raimi, available here; Note sur l’histoire des nombres entiers négatifs (Note on the History of Negative Numbers) by … Read more
The latest issue of the New York Review of Books contains a book review by George Stauffer about Alban Berg with this bewildering sentence about Berg’s childhood: He showed few signs of musical talent as a youth aside from informal piano lessons, reading through the scores of songs and operas, and playing four-hand arrangements of … Read more
… is to have a top scientist spot your talent and encourage you, however humble your status may be then. Wikipedia has a terse entry about Dirk Rembrandtsz (with “sz” at the end), presented as a “seventeenth-century Dutch cartographer, mathematician, surveyor, astronomer, teacher and [religious dignitary]” with “more than thirty scientific publications to his name” … Read more
It is remarkable that almost half a century after Dijkstra’s goto article, and however copiously and reverently it may be cited, today’s programs (other than in Eiffel) are still an orgy of gotos. There are not called gotos, being described as constructs that break out of a loop or exit a routine in multiple … Read more
This report continues the series of ICSE 2013 article previews (see the posts of these last few days, other than the DOSE announcement), but is different from its predecessors since it talks about a paper from our group at ETH, so you should not expect any dangerously delusional, disingenuously dubious or downright deceptive declaration … Read more
To inaugurate the “Reading Notes” series [1] I will take articles from the forthcoming International Conference on Software Engineering. Since I am not going to ICSE this year I am instead spending a little time browsing through the papers, obligingly available on the conference site. I’ll try whenever possible to describe a paper before … Read more
It is natural for any researcher to want to talk about his and his colleagues’ work, and I have often used this blog to mention results, events and publications in which I am involved at ETH, ITMO, Eiffel Software, Informatics Europe, ACM etc. But it is also important to report about interesting stuff from … Read more