Software engineering, programming methodology, languages, verification, general technology, publication culture, and more
The Orbitz page for booking a flight itinerary has an interesting menu option: Longest duration? If you find that the direct route is too short, you can always add a stop in Vladivostok. Under a few basic assumptions it has to be a theorem that, given any itinerary from A to B, there exists a … Read more
The character of Ubu, created by Alfred Jarry (1873-1907), deserves to be better known. The Wikipedia entry on Jarry’s 1896 play Ubu Roi (Ubu the King) explains: According to Jane Taylor, “the central character is notorious for his infantile engagement with his world. Ubu inhabits a domain of greedy self-gratification”. Jarry’s metaphor for the modern … Read more
The AutoProof technology pursues the goal of “Verification As a Matter Of Course”, integrated into the EVE development environment. (The AutoProof project page here; see particularly the online interactive tutorial.) A one-day workshop devoted to the existing AutoProof and current development will take place on October 1 near Toulouse in France. It is an informal … Read more
In spite of all the interest in both agile methods and MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) there are few courses on agile methods; I know only of some specialized MOOCs focused on a particular language or method. I produced for EdX, with the help of Marco Piccioni, a new MOOC entitled Agile Software Development. It … Read more
Many robotics applications are by nature concurrent; in his ongoing PhD work, Andrey Rusakov [1] is building a comprehensive concurrent robot programming framework, Roboscoop [2], based on the SCOOP model for simple concurrent object-oriented programming [3] and the Ros operating system. As part of this work it is important to know how much robotics applications … Read more
The 2016 session of the LASER summer school, now in its 13th edition, has just been announced. The theme is new for the school, and timely: software for robotics. Below is the announcement. School site: here The 2016 LASER summer school will be devoted to Software for Robotics. It takes place from 10 to 18 … Read 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
Sometimes it is better not to know French. You will never quite get what Voltaire, Molière, Beauvoir, Zola, Hugo and Proust really mean and what Carmen and Faust really sing. But at least you will not find out what the Marseillaise really says. It is France’s national anthem and, according to a site dedicated to … Read more