
Fourteen Years of Software Engineering at ETH Zurich - lainon
https://arxiv.org/abs/1712.05078
======
YorkshireSeason
Meyer's most interesting sentence is the last [1], about the extent to which
he achieved his research goals at ETHZ:

    
    
       [T]he story told in this article is 
       one of glaring, unremitted and probably 
       definitive failure. 
    

What wonderful and unusual honesty.

[1]
[https://arxiv.org/pdf/1712.05078.pdf#page=95](https://arxiv.org/pdf/1712.05078.pdf#page=95)

~~~
amelius
Yes, but why save this statement until the end? The abstract and introduction
say nothing of the sort.

~~~
YorkshireSeason
Why do you say "hello, nice to meet you"?

I imagine that this document was written to a target audience, propbably so as
to satify some funder's requirement, e.g. as 'post-mortem' for his ERC grants.
Audiences have expectations as to what can and cannot be said. Funding
organisations want/need success stories. Honesty is not always appropriate see
e.g. yesterday's [1]. Honesty needs 'padding'. Meyer had numerous students,
and his last sentence makes a statement about their professional work too.

[1]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15924093](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15924093)

~~~
amelius
> Meyer had numerous students, and his last sentence makes a statement about
> their professional work too.

Well, I think the phrase "glaring, unremitted and probably definitive failure"
is not one of modest honesty, and if he would have wanted to be politically
correct, he could have definitely phrased it differently. (Just trying to look
at this objectively).

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gfredtech
Meyer is the creator of the Eiffel programming language. Most of Eiffel's OOP
features were borrowed by other successful OO languages, but I still don't
understand why Eiffel never took off.

~~~
YorkshireSeason
Most PLs don't take off.

Language choice is mostly dependent of social factors that can be summarised
as "network effect". In PLs that manifests itself primarily through a lack of
mature and numerous libraries.

Eiffel had additional technical flaws:

\- Subtyping was wrong.

\- Handling of concurrency was wrong, in the sense that almost all concurrency
was hidden, instead of exposed. Eiffel was an anti-Erlang in this regard.

\- A lot of modern PL features were missing, e.g. pattern matching, first-
class higher-order functions.

\- The single most distinctive of Eiffel's features, built-in support for
assertions, was not supported by good-enough tools.

I would argue that the last point is still the case today for all formal
verification, see e.g. Microsoft's Dafny [1]. Automating formal verification
so that normal programmers can use it routinely in mainstream programming is
an unsolved problem in December 2017.

[1] [https://github.com/Microsoft/dafny](https://github.com/Microsoft/dafny)

~~~
pjmlp
Higher order functions have been added in later language updates.

------
neebz
Great to see Manuel Oriol get a mention. He was my thesis advisor at
University of York and one of the best professors I've worked with.

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royalghost
Quite an incredible feat!

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flor1s
I mastered in Software Engineering at the University of Twente in The
Netherlands, however in the past few years that program has discontinued and I
think has been replaced by a program called "Software Technology". I'm so
surprised that these kinds of programs are disappearing while the work of
Software Engineers has been becoming more and more complicated due to the
myriad of external products and services we are supposed to be using (the
cloud, containers, container orchestration, version control/continuous
integration/deployment/delivery, DevOps, GitHub, unit testing, software for
remote pair programming, etc.).

I was lucky enough to be able to attend the LASER Summer School on Software
Engineering for Robotics this year, which was a nice experience and I'm really
grateful for Bertrand Meyer for organizing it. The LASER Summer School in 2018
will be about cryptocurrencies, so if anyone is interested in that you should
certainly check out [http://www.laser-foundation.org](http://www.laser-
foundation.org)

~~~
royalghost
looks quite interesting. do they provide any fellowships or financial stipend
to attend this course ?

~~~
flor1s
I'm not sure. You could contact the organizers. In my case my university
supported me.

