Who gets what
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
Hitting on America
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
Loop invariants: the musical
Actually it is not a musical but an extensive survey. I have long been fascinated by the notion of loop invariant, which describes the essence of a loop. Considering a loop without its invariant is like conducting an orchestra without a score. In this submitted survey paper written with Sergey Velder and Carlo Furia … Read more
Publication list
I have updated my publication list [1] to include recently published and accepted papers, and some ongoing work. Most of the papers are collaborative, reflecting the work of our ETH and ITMO groups on verification, concurrency and methodology. Reference [1] Publication list, available here (in various formats).
Computer scientist gallery, updated
After several months of inaction I have updated my “Gallery of Computer Scientists” [1]. It benefits from many recent meetings where the density per square meter of Turing award winners and other brilliant computer scientists was hard to beat, most notably the two extraordinary Turing centenary celebrations — the ACM event in San Francisco, and … Read more
Memories of a dark time
A few years back my mother started writing her memoirs. She only completed a few chapters, hand-written, and I offered to type them up. There was not enough material to approach a publisher (my fault, for not pushing her to write more); the text has remained unpublished. I am making it available now: see … Read more
Technology plus
As the name indicates, this blog is particularly devoted to technology, and even more particularly to software technology. My technical persona is not, however, completely cut off from my personal persona and I increasingly include non-software topics. Whether there is any readership equally interested in learning about using domain theory for specification and finding out … Read more