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Swiss railway prowess
Yesterday, wanting to find out the platform of an arriving train (stations are good at displaying departures, but don’t seem to consider arrival information worth showing), I fired up the “SBB...
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The laws of branching (part 1)
The first law of branching is: don’t. There is no other law. The only sane way to develop software in a group, whether collocated or distributed, is to have a single branch (“trunk”) to which...
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Another displaced business
Front-page notice in yesterday’s Tages Anzeiger (one of the principal Swiss newspapers): Dear Readers: From today the employment-ads section will no longer appear as a separate supplement, but directly...
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The laws of branching (part 2): Tichy and Joy
Recently I mentioned the first law of branching (see earlier article) to Walter Tichy, famed creator of RCS, the system that established modern configuration management. He replied with the following...
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Reuse of another kind
This is a plug for a family member, but for a good cause: reuse and the environment. There are many reasons for promoting reuse in software; in other fields some of those reasons apply too, plus many...
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The secret of success
In the process of finishing a book right now, it occurred to me that writing is really a simple matter. There are only three issues to address: How to start. How to finish. How to take care of the...
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Hungarian rotation
The 2013 Informatics Europe “Best Practices in Education” award was devoted, this year, to initiatives for teaching informatics in schools [1]. It was given out last week at the European Computer...
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Informatics education in Europe: Just the facts
In 2005 a number of us started Informatics Europe [1], the association of university departments and industrial research labs in computer science in Europe. The association has now grown to 80...
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The biggest software-induced disaster ever
In spite of the brouhaha surrounding the Affordable Care Act, the US administration and its partisans seem convinced that “the Web site problems will be fixed”. That is doubtful. All reports suggest...
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New paper: alias calculus and frame inference
For a while now I have been engaged in a core problem of software verification: the aliasing problem. As with many difficult problems in science, it is easy to state the basic question: can we...
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Niklaus Wirth birthday symposium, 20 February, Zurich
In honor of Niklaus Wirth’s 80-th birthday we are organizing a symposium at ETH on February 20, 2014. This is a full-day event with invited talks by: Vint Cerf Hans Eberlé Michael Franz me Carroll...
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Saint Petersburg Software Engineering Seminar: 14 January 2014 (6 PM)
There will be two talks in the Software Engineering Seminar at ITMO, 18:00 local time, Tuesday, January 14, 2014. Please arrive 10 minutes early for registration. Place: ITMO, Sytninskaya Ulitsa, Saint...
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Negative variables: new version
I have mentioned this paper before (see the earlier blog entry here) but it is now going to be published [1] and has been significantly revised, both to take referee comments into account and because...
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PhD positions in concurrency/distribution/verification at ETH
As part of our “Concurrency Made Easy” ERC Advanced Investigator Grant project (2012-2017), we are offering PhD positions at the Chair of Software Engineering of ETH Zurich. The goal of the project is...
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LASER 2014 (Elba, September)
2014 marks the 10-th anniversary (11th edition) of the LASER summer school. The school will be held September 7-14, 2014, and the detailed information is here. LASER (the name means Laboratory for...
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Eiffel as an expression language
A functional-programming style, or more generally a style involving more expressions and fewer instructions, is possible in Eiffel. In particular, Eiffel’s agent mechanism embeds a full...
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Learning to program, online
The ETH introductory programming course, which I have taught since 2003 and used as the basis for the Springer Touch of Class textbook, is now available as a MOOC: an online course, open to anyone...
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Agile book announced
My book “Agile! The Good, the Hype and the Ugly” will be published in a few weeks by Springer. The announced date is April 30 and there is a preview Amazon page: here.
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New article: passive processors
The SCOOP concurrency model has a clear division of objects into “regions”, improving the clarity and reliability of concurrent programs by establishing a close correspondence between the object...
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New article: contracts in practice
For almost anyone programming in Eiffel, contracts are just a standard part of daily life; Patrice Chalin’s pioneering study of a few years ago [1] confirmed this impression. A larger empirical study...
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