Software engineering, programming methodology, languages, verification, general technology, publication culture, and more
One of the most improvable characteristics of scientific papers is the graphical presentation of numerical data. It is sad to see that thirty years after Tufte published the first edition of his masterpiece [1] many authors are still including grossly inaccurate graphics. Sadder still when the authors are professional graphists, who should know better. … Read more
EiffelStudio releases are semi-annual, end of May and end of November. Release 14-05 just came out. The next release (14-11) is entirely devoted to documentation. We are hoping for extensive community involvement in this first-time Eiffel Documentation Drive. Many people regularly comment that there is not enough Eiffel and EiffelStudio documentation, and some of what … Read more
InfoWorld is currently publishing a series of programming language assessments: 9 Things We Hate About Objective-C, 4 June. 15 Things We Hate About Java, 6 March. 10 Features Apple Stole for the Swift Programming Language, 9 June. Notable in these articles is what they do not mention: Eiffel has most of what the author … Read more
It is remarkable that almost half a century after Dijkstra’s goto article, and however copiously and reverently it may be cited, today’s programs (other than in Eiffel) are still an orgy of gotos. There are not called gotos, being described as constructs that break out of a loop or exit a routine in multiple … Read more
Book announcement: Agile! The Good, the Hype and the Ugly Bertrand Meyer Springer, 2014 (just appeared) Book page: here. Amazon page: here. Publisher’s page: here A few years ago I became fascinated with agile methods: with the unique insights they include; with the obvious exaggerations and plainly wrong advice they also promote; and perhaps most … Read more
(Adapted from an article previously published on the CACM blog.) Often, you will be told that programming languages do not matter much. What actually matters more is not clear; maybe tools, maybe methodology, maybe process. It is a pretty general rule that people arguing that language does not matter are defending bad languages. Let us … Read more
Last week at the the CSEE&T conference in Klagenfurt (the conference page is here, I gave a keynote), a panel discussed how universities should prepare students for software engineering. Barry Boehm, one of the panelists, stated the following principle, which afterwards he said he had learned from Simon Ramo, co-founder of TRW. In hiring … Read more