5 ms·

Fourteen Years of Software Engineering at ETH Zurich

71 points by lainon 9y ago

flor1s 9y ago
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University of Twente in The Netherlands, however in the past few years that program has discontinued and I think has been replaced by a program called "Software Technology".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 9y ago
  looks quite interesting. do they provide any fellowships or financial stipend to attend this course ?
  - flor1s 9y ago
    I'm not sure. You could contact the organizers. In my case my university supported me.
royalghost 9y ago
Quite an incredible feat!
YorkshireSeason 9y ago
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 9y ago
  Yes, but why save this statement until the end? The abstract and introduction say nothing of the sort.
  - YorkshireSeason 9y ago
    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 9y ago
      > 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).
  - vikascoder 9y ago
    Pump and Dump European Sarcasm.
  - throwaway262 9y ago
    Here, let me paste in the rest of the quote for context: "The outcomes that matter in research are not numerous publications, best-paper awards, PhD theses, keynote invitations, software tools, citations and other measurable signs of progress. I was after real success, in the sense of changing the way the IT industry develops software. That was the only justification for putting in parentheses my career as a technology entrepreneur. When you have an ambitious goal, you should be judged by that goal. Such absurd pieties as “it’s the journey that matters” or “what’s important is to participate” (by, of all people, Coubertin, founder of modern Olympics) are even more wrong in research than anywhere else. Only the result counts. By that standard, the story told in this article is one of glaring, unremitted and probably definitive failure." Still, if you're too lazy to click on a goddamn link to get the answer to your question, I doubt that'll help you much.
neebz 9y ago
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.
gfredtech 9y ago
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 9y ago
  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 9y ago
    Higher order functions have been added in later language updates.
- cadr 9y ago
  I have a memory that there weren't any free implementations for quite a while, which might have slowed adoption.
- pjmlp 9y ago
  It was initially only available in commercial versions, with enterprise level prices, similarly like Ada. Think Rational Rose, Together, Enterprise Architect, Visual Studio Ultimate kind of prices. Eiffel is a great language, proper OOP, value types, generics, contracts, MI, non nullable types, nice IDE, JIT and AOT compilation via native or C/C++ compilers. But the price made it out of reach for most developers and the open source variants were a poor replication of the whole experience. Nowdays there is a free license for open source projects, but it is too late for widespread adoption.
Kenji 9y ago
I attended Bertrand Meyer's lectures, in particular his last Software Engineering one. It's one of the least useful lectures I've ever had at this university. I also bought his book which I'm also not a fan of. So, yeah. Also, Eiffel is like 10 times slower than Java for even the most basic algorithms. If you want to learn software engineering, learn from kernel engineers and not academics who have never programmed something that is used in most people's daily life.

71 points by lainon 9y ago

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 9y ago
looks quite interesting. do they provide any fellowships or financial stipend to attend this course ?
- flor1s 9y ago
  I'm not sure. You could contact the organizers. In my case my university supported me.

royalghost 9y ago

Quite an incredible feat!

YorkshireSeason 9y ago

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 9y ago
Yes, but why save this statement until the end? The abstract and introduction say nothing of the sort.
- YorkshireSeason 9y ago
  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 9y ago
    > 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).
- vikascoder 9y ago
  Pump and Dump European Sarcasm.
- throwaway262 9y ago
  Here, let me paste in the rest of the quote for context: "The outcomes that matter in research are not numerous publications, best-paper awards, PhD theses, keynote invitations, software tools, citations and other measurable signs of progress. I was after real success, in the sense of changing the way the IT industry develops software. That was the only justification for putting in parentheses my career as a technology entrepreneur. When you have an ambitious goal, you should be judged by that goal. Such absurd pieties as “it’s the journey that matters” or “what’s important is to participate” (by, of all people, Coubertin, founder of modern Olympics) are even more wrong in research than anywhere else. Only the result counts. By that standard, the story told in this article is one of glaring, unremitted and probably definitive failure." Still, if you're too lazy to click on a goddamn link to get the answer to your question, I doubt that'll help you much.

neebz 9y ago

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.

gfredtech 9y ago

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 9y ago
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 9y ago
  Higher order functions have been added in later language updates.
cadr 9y ago
I have a memory that there weren't any free implementations for quite a while, which might have slowed adoption.
pjmlp 9y ago
It was initially only available in commercial versions, with enterprise level prices, similarly like Ada. Think Rational Rose, Together, Enterprise Architect, Visual Studio Ultimate kind of prices. Eiffel is a great language, proper OOP, value types, generics, contracts, MI, non nullable types, nice IDE, JIT and AOT compilation via native or C/C++ compilers. But the price made it out of reach for most developers and the open source variants were a poor replication of the whole experience. Nowdays there is a free license for open source projects, but it is too late for widespread adoption.

Kenji 9y ago

I attended Bertrand Meyer's lectures, in particular his last Software Engineering one. It's one of the least useful lectures I've ever had at this university. I also bought his book which I'm also not a fan of. So, yeah. Also, Eiffel is like 10 times slower than Java for even the most basic algorithms. If you want to learn software engineering, learn from kernel engineers and not academics who have never programmed something that is used in most people's daily life.