Bertrand Meyer's technology+ blog
Software engineering, programming methodology, languages, verification, general technology, publication culture, and more
Recently I mentioned the first law of branching (see earlier article) to Walter Tichy, famed creator of RCS, the system that established modern configuration management. He replied with the following anecdote, which is worth reproducing in its entirety (in his own words): I started work on RCS in 1980, because I needed an alternative for … Read more
Front-page notice in yesterday’s Tages Anzeiger (one of the principal Swiss newspapers): Dear Readers: From today the employment-ads section will no longer appear as a separate supplement, but directly as a section of the Tuesdays and Thursday paper. The reason is the ever smaller number of position offerings. It seems clear that what has decreased … Read more
This is a slightly reworked version of an article in the CACM blog, which also served as the introduction to a panel which I moderated at ESEC/FSE 2013 last week; the panelists were Harald Gall, Mark Harman, Giancarlo Succi (position paper only) and Tony Wasserman. For all the books on software engineering, and the articles, … Read more
Our Concurrency Made Easy project, the result of an ERC Advanced Investigator Grant, is trying to solve the problem of making concurrent programming simple, reliable and effective. It has spurred related efforts, in particular the Roboscoop project applying concurrency to robotics software. Sebastian Nanz and other members of the CME project at ETH have just … Read more
A new version of my Touch of Class [1] programming textbook is available. It is not quite a new edition but more than just a new printing. All the typos that had been reported as of a few months ago have been corrected. The format is also significantly smaller. This change is more than a … Read more
I have always admired Daniel Barenboim, both as a pianist and as a conductor — and not just because years ago, from pictures on disk covers, we looked strikingly alike, see e.g. [1] which could almost be me at that time (Then I went to see him in concert and realized that he was … Read more
I have mentioned this paper before but as a draft. It has now been accepted by ACM’s Computing Surveys and is scheduled to appear in September 2014; the current text, revised from the previous version, is available [1]. Here is the abstract: Software verification has emerged as a key concern for ensuring the continued … Read more