Software engineering, programming methodology, languages, verification, general technology, publication culture, and more
To buy a Zurich Opera ticket online you have to register on their site, including choosing a form of address from a list which beats any I have seen: As a side detail, their system does not work: to enable registration and booking it is supposed to send you an email with your password, and … Read more
The EAQSE workshop is devoted to Empirical Answers to Questions of Software Engineering. The deadline is looming. Just announced: Tom Zimmerman from Microsoft Research will deliver the keynote. Tom is uniquely qualified; he has performed unique studies of what people, particularly software engineering practitioners, expect from empirical research. See hereand there. Outstanding papers. See also … Read more
Involuntary poetry that is. This one is even more puzzling, in its own charming way, than the previously cited example. From https://www.amazon.fr/dp/B072V71WVN/ref=psdc_3155122031_t4_B073PYSZNG: Pour être une dame ou un monsieur : Bouteille de vin automatique ouverte sans effort avec ce tire-bouchon électrique. Gardez votre élégant ou votre gentleman pendant que vous ouvrez la bouteille de vin. … Read more
(Originally published on CACM blog.) Most of the world programs in a very strange way. Strange to me. I usually hear the reverse question: people ask us, the Eiffel community, to explain why we program our way. I hardly understand the question, because the only mystery is how anyone can even program in any other … Read more
There is one more speaker at the LASER 2018 summer school two weeks from now: Dominic Woerner from Bosch. Mr. Woerner is a solution architect for Internet of Things and distributed ledger applications with Bosch Digital Solutions, and a researcher within the Bosch Economy of Things research project. He did his PhD at ETH Zurich … Read more
(This article is about the kind of French that you find on e-commerce sites these days.) Le site amazon.fr a de plus en plus de produits destinés à des marchés internationaux et bénéficiant d’une présentation en français produite par des algorithmes approximatifs. Je ne suis pas absolument sûr du « bénéfice » en question, ni d’ailleurs … Read more
Bertrand Meyer: Making Sense of Agile Methods, in IEEE Software, vol. 35, no. 2, March 2018, pages 91-94. IEEE article page here (may require membership or purchase). Draft available here. An assessment of agile methods, based on my book Agile! The Good, the Hype and the Ugly. It discusses, beyond the hype, the benefits and … Read more
Every couple of weeks or so, I receive a message such as the one below; whenever I give a talk on any computer science topic anywhere in the world, strangers come to me to express similar sentiments. While I enjoy compliments as much as anyone else, I am not the right recipient for such comments. … Read more
Interview (in Russian) of Nadia Polikarpova (who proved the correctness of the EiffelBase 2 library in her PhD at ETH and is now an assistant professor at UCSD) on the site of her original university, ITMO. She explains the US tenure-track system to Europeans — good luck! She also says that programming language people are … Read more
Every Mozart study states that his last Symphony, “Jupiter” (Köchel 551), is one of humankind’s greatest musical achievements. Every description of the symphony indicates that the first movement borrows a theme from a concert aria. Every one that I have read expresses surprise at this self-borrowing and states that the reason for it is a … Read more