Software engineering, programming methodology, languages, verification, general technology, publication culture, and more
I recently read the autobiography [1] of the great mathematician André Weil and came across the following comment (slightly abridged): Any mathematician worthy of the name has known such states of lucid exaltation, when ideas magically fall into place. Poincaré, in a famous passage, described how he experienced such a moment when he discovered … Read more
Another completely unexpected gem from the Viaje de Turquia (see the previous article on this blog): a 16-th century statement of the Dunning-Kruger effect! An effect, of course, which has never been more visible than today (just watch the news). Against Pedro, who narrates his travels and travails, the dialog sets two other characters, friends … Read more
At this gloomy moment it is good to find a gem in an unexpected place. I am reading (in translation) the Viaje de Turquia, or Turkish Voyage — literaly, Voyage of Turkey — a 16th-century epic dialog, whose authorship is disputed. It is a precious source of information on the period and rings throughout like a … Read more
In the current state of the pandemic and for many more months until a vaccine is found, there is exactly one way to fight the coronavirus, protecting yourself and protecting others. It is not a mask. It is two masks. You wear a mask, I wear a mask. Many people still believe that they can … Read more
About this article: it originated as a series of posts on the Communications of the ACM blog. I normally repost such articles here. (Even though copy-paste is usually not good, there are three reasons for this duplication: the readership seems to be largely disjoint; I can use better formatting, since their blog software is more … Read more
For some time I have been nudging (yes, I am that kind of person) two young boys in my family, two cousins who are both learning the piano, to try Schubert’s delightful (and not very military) Marche Militaire together. With not much success until recently… but now they are stuck in their (neighboring) homes, and … Read more
Consider the following expression: ∃ c: s ¦ moisture (c) = soft This is obviously mathematics. To express such a property in a programming language, you have to write a function containing a loop that iterates through the elements of s. Right? Wrong. The above construct is valid Eiffel. It’s a consequence of recent … Read more
In my last article, time to live up to the boasting, I pointed out how bewildering it is to see that top newspapers around the world, the supposed “papers of reference”, continue both to: Extoll their grandiose proclamations of supposed devotion to public service. Charge for access to the epidemic that is scaring the world. … Read more
The decent media is not modest these days. “Democracy Dies in Darkness” says the excellent Washington Post, intimating, if I understand it right, that the only way for the US to avoid dictatorship is that I pay subscription fees. Maybe I would if they just stopped devoting every single one of their articles to King … Read more