Bertrand Meyer's technology+ blog
Software engineering, programming methodology, languages, verification, general technology, publication culture, and more
ACM is offering this coming Wednesday a one-hour webinar entitled Agile Methods: The Good, the Hype and the Ugly. It will air on February 18 at 1 PM New York time (10 AM West Coast, 18 London, 19 Paris, see here for more cities). The event is free and the registration link is here. The … Read more
How can we make sure that people are aware of each other’s changes to a shared software base? Iin particular, can we avoid the dreaded case of a merge conflict: you and I are working on the same piece of code, but we find out too late, and we have to undergo the painful process of reconciling our conflicting changes.
To verify sequential programs, we have to prove that they do the right thing, but also that they do it within our lifetime — that they terminate. The termination problem is considerably harder with concurrent programs, since they add a new form of non-termination: deadlock. A set of concurrent processes or threads will deadlock if … Read more
Our online course Computing: Art, Magic, Science, available from EdX, opens this Tuesday (tomorrow, 30 September) at 9 AM Zurich time (and at this time in your area). An earlier article on this blog described the course, which integrates ten years of experience teaching introductory programming at ETH, and takes advantage of remote-compilation and remote-execution … Read more
The Paris computer science bookstore Le Monde en Tique is organizing, this coming Friday, Oct. 3, starting at 5 PM, a signing session for my book Agile! The Good, the Hype and the Ugly [1]. About the book (for readers new to this site): it provides a cold-blooded analysis of agile methods and examines their … Read more
The IEEE’s Harlan Mills award is the principal prize in software engineering. The 2014 recipients are Patrick and Radhia Cousot, recognized for their groundbreaking work on abstract interpretation; Patrick will receive the award at ICSME 2014 on Oct. 1st. The list of previous recipients is here. I have the privilege of serving as the current … Read more
My colleagues and I have just finished recording our new MOOC (online course), an official ETH offering on the EdX platform. The preview is available [1] and the course will run starting in September. As readers of this blog know, I have enthusiastically, under the impulsion of Marco Piccioni at ETH, embraced MOOC technology … Read more