Software engineering, programming methodology, languages, verification, general technology, publication culture, and more
A few years ago I was driving on a freeway in France and turned on the radio, chancing on France-Culture. (In passing it is fair to note the abundance of quality programs on that station. It has its share of empty Parisian intellectual chit-chat but much of the time I learn something interesting.) I was … Read more
I was recently looking at the math exercises of a 14-year-old, having to do with quadratic (second-degree) equations. The first thing that caught my eye is not a surprise: the difference between school and life. The quadratic polynomials appearing in the exercises, such as x2 – x – 6, all happen to have integer roots … Read more
The CF-Index, or Conference Frustration index, is an integer n (n ≥ 1) defined as follows. You are at a conference where your paper submission was rejected, and sitting in the session devoted to that paper’s very topic. You think for yourself “My paper was at least n times better than the average here”. That … Read more
On 13-15 September 1999 a symposium took place in St Catherine College in Oxford, in honor of Tony Hoare’s “retirement” from Oxford (the word is in quotes because he has had several further productive careers since). The organizers were Jim Woodcock, Bill Roscoe and Jim Davies. The proceedings are available as Millenial Perspectives in Computer … Read more
[This is a verbatim copy of a post in the Communications of the ACM blog, 9 January 2024.] I am still in shock from the unexpected death of Niklaus Wirth eight days ago. If you allow a personal note (not the last one in this article): January 11, two days from now, was inscribed in … Read more
In August I was planning for my participation in the ICTSS conference in Bergamo, Italy, and wanted to find some accommodation within walking distance of the conference place. Bergamo has a medieval “città alta”, high city, at the top of a hill, and a “città bassa”, low city, down in the valley, where modern expansion … Read more
I recently wrote a working paper (on academic careers) and since it was urgently needed I did not want to spend time on style issues but instead to keep things simple. So I preceded it with the comment “Using he’ as an abbreviation for `he or she’.” I received the helpful suggestion that I could … Read more
Are you not tired, too, of those endlessly repeated arguments that, sure, it was not very polite of Putin to invade Ukraine, but you have to understand the situation, it’s all the fault of NATO’s aggressive westward expansion which, you know, was provoking the Russians! You see this argument everywhere on social networks and also … Read more
Maria Naumcheva, Sophie Ebersold, Alexandr Naumchev, Jean-Michel Bruel, Florian Galinier and Bertrand Meyer: Object-Oriented Requirements: a Unified Framework for Specifications, Scenarios and Tests, in JOT (Journal of Object Technology), vol. 22, no. 1, pages 1:1-19, 2023. Available here with link to PDF (the journal is open-access). From the abstract: A paradox of requirements specifications as … Read more
I harbor no illusion about the effectiveness of airing this particular pet peeve; complaining about it has about the same chance of success as protesting against split infinitives or music in restaurants. Still, it is worth mentioning that the widespread use of the word “statement” to denote a programming language element, such as an assignment, that … Read more