Pearls of the FOSE 2010, from the back of an envelope

I've been to The Future of Software Engineering Symposium at ETH Zurich. It was amazing to meet in person some of the true legends of our field. Here's a random set of entertaining notes I took.

E. Gamma re C. Alexander's books on pattern language:

— Those are the books we'd like to have on our shelves. Some of us even read them. I didn't.

D. Parnas:

— “Requirements” is not a list. It's a predicate.

— …But the open source code I looked at is crap! (in response to Gamma's offer to learn good design from OSS projects)

— Did the people who spell well learn it from a spell checker? (re a verification tool driving the coding)

M. Broy:

— Software engineering is in a much better shape than one would think after attending this conference.

N. Wirth:

— Everyone get the language they deserve.

A. Zeller:

— If you need a lot of versatile bug samples for your static analysis, simply take AspectJ.

— How do we solve anything fundamental in software engineering now? Everyone takes his tool of choice, like a hammer, and we together beat the problem until it's smashed.

B. Meyer:

— JUnit isn't an automated testing, it's just an automated tests running.

P. Cousot:

— Programmers live in a virtual world, without responsibility.

Y. Gurevich:

— The future isn’t what it used to be.

— For a breakthrough in software engineering we need something like what quantum physics is for physics; something where our intuition is of no value.

— Everyone keeps checking if his program is correct, while the answer is obvious: it isn't.

P.S.

Such a fanboy :)

Published: 2010-11-23

Tagged: scratch conference quote