Software engineering, programming methodology, languages, verification, general technology, publication culture, and 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
A chemistry researcher published a paper in Science with two junior collaborators and, a few months later, found flaws and retracted the article. She commented “I am totally bummed to announce that we have retracted last year’s paper on enzymatic synthesis of beta-lactams” and “it is painful to admit, but important to do so” and … Read more
In the restrooms of French freeway service stations managed by Total, the soap dispensers partake of pressing advice: The message reads: ONLY ONCE Press for clean hands 1x Total wants to save on costs. Soap is money. Fine. But on the matter of hand-washing one might (perhaps) think, in the current circumstances, of more urgent … Read more
On April 29 in the early evening at the Schaffhausen Institute of Technology I will give a talk on “The Beauty of Software”, exploring examples of what makes some concepts, algorithms, data structures etc. produce a sense of esthetics. (Full abstract below.) I gave a first version at TOOLS last year but am revising and … Read more
When you want to contact academic researchers, particularly computer scientists, you often find their email addresses on their Web pages in a mildly obfuscated form such as “albert dot einstein at princeton dot edu”. If you try to copy-paste such a pseudo-address into an email client so as to fix it there, you often have … Read more
Gilles Brassard, quantum cryptography pioneer (among other achievements), will give two talks this Wednesday (22.01): One at the University of Zurich, at 11:15 (session start at 10:30) on “The Art of Secret Communication in a Quantum World””. The other at the Schaffhausen Institute of Technology at 18:30 (session start at 17:30, talks followed by Apéro) … Read more
I am giving a “distinguished lecture” at the University of California, Santa Barbara, January 10 (Friday, tomorrow) at 14. The title is A Comprehensive Approach to Requirements Engineering. The abstract and rest of the information are here. I will spend the last few minutes of the talk discussing other current developments (verification, concurrency).