Software engineering
New MOOC opens Tuesday
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
Analysis of agile methods: book signing in Paris this Friday at 5 PM
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
Harlan Mills award 2015: nominations sought
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
Computing: the Art, the Magic, the Science
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
When pictures lie
One of the most improvable characteristics of scientific papers is the graphical presentation of numerical data. It is sad to see that thirty years after Tufte published the first edition of his masterpiece [1] many authors are still including grossly inaccurate graphics. Sadder still when the authors are professional graphists, who should know better. … Read more
The Eiffel Documentation Drive
EiffelStudio releases are semi-annual, end of May and end of November. Release 14-05 just came out. The next release (14-11) is entirely devoted to documentation. We are hoping for extensive community involvement in this first-time Eiffel Documentation Drive. Many people regularly comment that there is not enough Eiffel and EiffelStudio documentation, and some of what … Read more
Programming language features
InfoWorld is currently publishing a series of programming language assessments: 9 Things We Hate About Objective-C, 4 June. 15 Things We Hate About Java, 6 March. 10 Features Apple Stole for the Swift Programming Language, 9 June. Notable in these articles is what they do not mention: Eiffel has most of what the author … Read more
Reading Notes: Single-Entry, Single-Exit
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