Software engineering
Computer scientist gallery, updated
After several months of inaction I have updated my “Gallery of Computer Scientists” [1]. It benefits from many recent meetings where the density per square meter of Turing award winners and other brilliant computer scientists was hard to beat, most notably the two extraordinary Turing centenary celebrations — the ACM event in San Francisco, and … Read more
Memories of a dark time
A few years back my mother started writing her memoirs. She only completed a few chapters, hand-written, and I offered to type them up. There was not enough material to approach a publisher (my fault, for not pushing her to write more); the text has remained unpublished. I am making it available now: see … Read more
Handshake with a clown
In the circus business, the Zavatta family is a legend. From father to son and grandson, a Zavatta has for decades been the foremost clown of his generation, first in Italy, then in French North Africa, then in France proper. None was ever more famous than Achille Zavatta, who carried the family name through the … Read more
Word of the day
Word Umlottery [ˈʊm.lɑːɾɚɹi] (fr. umloterie, f; ger. Umlotterie, f.; it. umlotteria, f.; rus. умлотерия , f.). Definition A spur-of-the-moment and generally random decision, by a hesitant speaker of German talking in front of a (typically large) native-speaker audience, to pronounce the next intended word with, or without, an umlaut on the decisive syllable. Example use … Read more
Precedent
Alexander Kogtenkov pointed out to me that precursor work to my papers on the Alias Calculus [1] [2] had been published by John Whaley and Martin Rinard [3]. There are some significant differences; in particular my rules are simpler, and their work is not explicitly presented as a calculus. But many of the basic ideas … Read more
Salad requirements, requirements salad
If definitions are so hard, are requirements then impossible? The trick is that we often do not need a dictionary-style definition of what things are; we only need to know what they have, in other words what are their properties and operations. This is the abstract data type approach, also known as object technology. But it is still hard to convince the stakeholders to explain what they mean.