Bertrand Meyer's technology+ blog
Software engineering, programming methodology, languages, verification, general technology, publication culture, and more
There will be two talks in the Software Engineering Seminar at ITMO, 18:00 local time, Tuesday, January 14, 2014. Please arrive 10 minutes early for registration. Place: ITMO, Sytninskaya Ulitsa, Saint Petersburg. Andrey Terekhov (SPBGU): Programming crystals (I do not know whether this talk will be in Russian or English. An abstract follows but the … Read more
For a while now I have been engaged in a core problem of software verification: the aliasing problem. As with many difficult problems in science, it is easy to state the basic question: can we determine automatically whether at a program point p the values of two reference expressions e and f can ever denote … Read more
In 2005 a number of us started Informatics Europe [1], the association of university departments and industrial research labs in computer science in Europe. The association has now grown to 80 members across the entire continent; it organizes the annual European Computer Science Summit and has published a number of influential reports. The last … Read 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