Software engineering, programming methodology, languages, verification, general technology, publication culture, and more
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
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
Admittedly the number of people who will find the following funny, or of any interest at all, is pretty limited, so it is a good bet that about 99.86% of the faithful readers of this blog can safely wait for the next post. To appreciate the present one you must be a French-speaking nerd with … Read more
As part of a Festschrift volume for Martin Glinz of the university of Zurich I wrote a paper [1] describing a general approach to requirements that I have been practicing and developing for a while, and presented in a couple of talks. The basic idea is to rely on object-oriented techniques, including contracts for … Read more
The European Software Engineering Conference takes place every two years in connection with the ACM Foundations of Software Engineering symposium (which in even years is in the US). The next ESEC/FSE will be held for the first time in Russia, where it will be the first major international software engineering conference ever. It comes at … Read more
Antoine Galland (1646-1715), one of the great orientalists of the classical age, was sent by the government of Louis XIV to the court of the Sultan. Among his many discoveries he revealed the Thousand and One Nights and other Arabian Tales to the Western public through his French translation, Les Mille et Unes Nuits, Paris … Read more
In modeling object-oriented programs, for purposes of verification (proofs) or merely for a better understanding, we are faced with the unique “general relativity” property of OO programming: all the operations you write (excluding non-OO mechanisms such as static functions) are expressed relative to a “current object” which changes repeatedly during execution. More precisely at the … Read more
The following rules are not all that’s needed to understand life, but they go a long way. 1. It’s the tenor who gets the girl. (The baritone never stood a chance1.) 2. It’s the physicists who get the money. Note 1Actually I can think of a couple of exceptions (both Russian, I wonder … Read more
The study of agile methods is good for your skeptical bones. “Build the simplest thing that works, then refactor if needed.” Maybe. Maybe. But what about getting it right the first time around? Erich Kästner wrote an apposite ditty on this topic [1]: They tell you it’s OK if first you fail; OK perhaps … Read more