Bertrand Meyer's technology+ blog
Software engineering, programming methodology, languages, verification, general technology, publication culture, and more
(A version of this article also appeared on the CACM blog.) Miracles happen! Many months ago I accepted, perhaps too fast, a kind invitation to talk at the European Computer Science Summit, the annual conference of Informatics Europe, this week in Vienna. It came with a catch: I was not to choose my own topic but to … Read more
A third ACM webinar this year (after two on agile methods): I will be providing a general introduction to Design by Contract. The date is this coming Thursday, September 17, and the time is noon New York (18 Paris/Zurich, 17 London, 9 Los Angeles, see here for hours elsewhere). Please tune in! The event is … Read more
Programming, wrote Dijkstra many years ago, is a branch of applied mathematics. That is only half of the picture: the other half is engineering, and this dual nature of programming is part of its attraction. Descriptions of the mathematical side are generally, in my view, too complicated. This article [1] presents a mathematical theory of … Read more
After my earlier ACM Webinar on Agile Methods! The Good, the Hype and the Ugly there were so many questions from the audience, left unanswered for lack of time, that a follow-up session has been set up. It will take place tomorrow (Friday, 27 March 2015) at noon New York time (18 Paris/Berlin/Zurich, 5 PM … Read 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