Talk:Bertrand Meyer

Untitled
According to this, this article stated that Meyer died on 24th of December. Where is this edit? It's certainly not in the deletion logs or in a deleted version in the history! - Ta bu shi da yu 08:11, 17 January 2006 (UTC)
 * It's on the German Wikipedia - oops. Didn't notice this. - Ta bu shi da yu 08:20, 17 January 2006 (UTC)

removed this link, it leads to a "not found"....

There is a funny computer game called "Murfy's law : Bertrand's Rage!", which Mr. Meyer showed us during his presentation. It was developed in Eiffel by 1st year students, and shows some inside atmosphere in ETH -- the aim of game is to spoil Bertrand's lecture. Maybe add to external links? Project home page

Fortran programmer
While at Électricité de France, Dr Meyer apparently coded in Fortran. See
 * Bertrand Meyer, "Principles of Package Design", Commun. ACM 25(7): 419-428 (1982)

which is full of excellent advice for Fortran programmers. (I mention this in case anyone adds a "Trivia" section to the article.) Cheers, CWC (talk) 13:33, 11 August 2006 (UTC)
 * In those days almost all computers had FORTRAN, Basic and COBOL compilers. Numerical analysis courses used FORTRAN, rarely Algol or PL/I. Those in AI used LISP. There were not too much choices. He was lucky to learn the Z specification language, even today not many programmers know about those things.
 * It is not a good question for a trivia. Almost every student in those days learned FORTRAN. COBOL was used for the management systems.

Picture thing
Taking this issue to the talk page since edit summaries are short. :) I think that even though the consensus for the picture was "keep", we don't really need to have it on this article. He doesn't want it here, and I don't know of any reason to have it here except that it's nice to put pictures on articles. Dreamyshade (talk) 01:47, 11 December 2007 (UTC)


 * We don't really need Wikipedia either. The norm is to have a photo on the biography page. Looking at other biographies, it's hard to find one without a photo. A headshot would be better, but we can only choose from the Wikipedia Commons stock. I looked at the history, and it's clear that the consensus was to include the photo. --David Broadfoot (talk) 15:25, 11 December 2007 (UTC)

CQS (Command Query Separation)
CQS is a foundational principle of software engineering, and the CQS article references Bertrand Meyer (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Command%E2%80%93query_separation). This should be mentioned on Bertrand's page, as it is hugely important!

Erase "Eiffel has been the reason of other languages including Java, C# and Python"
It is true that:
 * His experiences with object technology through the Simula language, as well as early work on abstract data types and formal specification (including the Z notation), provided some of the background for the development of Eiffel.

to which is also evident the influence of Floyd, Hoare and Dijstra axiomatc semantics in the use of pre- and post- conditions in contracts. Bertand Meyer coined the term 'contract' for that, and he also has a very structured view of a software engineering grounded in formal methods. Something that many other OO methodologies lack, relaying in anthropomorphic metaphors instead.

But the assertion that:
 * Eiffel has been the reason of other languages including Java, C# and Python, without Eiffel there would not be such languages.[citation needed]

should be deleted, because, Java, C# derived from C++, a language promoted by his author as "a better C", that resulted in a good marketing. Python has dynamic types, something loved by programmers who hate to declare types, it hardly encourages a design based in ADTs, is an object oriented and functional paradigms salad, I don't see it as a language influenced by Eiffel at all.

The methodology proposed by Meyer, can be used with languages different from Eiffel, even Java, Python and believe it o not Fortran following a disciplined style.

The main Meyer's contribution is way in which he integrated formal methods to deal with the complexity of software development, something that I have not often seen in software developed in Java and Python. About C# I ignore it because I have not seen software developed in the X# languages.

Definitely it is not justified such assertion, I can't hardly see Eiffel as "the reason for other languages ...". it should be deleted.


 * It looks like the claim was added in [this edit]. I've deleted it. Jowa fan (talk) 03:20, 9 October 2021 (UTC)