The waves of publication






(This article first appeared in the Communications of the ACM blog.) The very concept of publication has changed, half of its traditional meaning having disappeared in hardly more than a decade. Or to put it differently (if you will accept the metaphor, explained below), how it has lost its duality: no longer particle, just wave. … Read more




Your IP: does Google care?






  A search for my name on Google Scholar [1] shows, at the top of the resulting list, my book Object-Oriented Software Construction [2], with over 7800 citations in the scientific literature. Very nice (thanks, and keep those citations coming!). That top result is a link to a pirated version [3] of the full content … Read more




How good are strong specifications? (New paper, ICSE 2013)






  A core aspect of our verification work is the use of “strong” contracts, which express sophisticated specification properties without requiring a separate specification language: even for advanced properties, there is no need for a separate specification language, with special notations such as those of first-order logic; instead, one can continue to rely, in the … Read more