Bertrand Meyer's technology+ blog
Software engineering, programming methodology, languages, verification, general technology, publication culture, and more
Some of the folk wisdom going around in software engineering, often cluessly repeated for decades, is just wrong. It can be particularly damaging when it affects key aspects of software development and is contradicted by solid scientific evidence. The present discussion covers a question that meets both of these conditions: whether it makes sense to … Read more
Over breakfast at your hotel you read an article berating banks about the fraudulent credit card transactions they let through. You proceed to check out and bang! Your credit card is rejected because (as you find out later) the bank thought [1] it couldn’t possibly be you in that exotic place. Ah, those banks! They … Read more
(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
(Originally a Risks forum posting, 1998.) Although complaints about Microsoft Word’s eagerness to correct what it sees as mistakes are not new in the Risks forum, I think it is still useful to protest vehemently the way recent versions of Word promote the dumbing down of English writing by flagging (at least when you use … Read more