Bertrand Meyer

Meyer pursues the ideal of simple, elegant and user-friendly computer languages and is one of the earliest and most vocal proponents of object-oriented programming (OOP). His book Object-Oriented Software Construction, translated into 15 languages, is one of the earliest and most comprehensive works presenting the case for OOP. Other books he has written include Eiffel: The Language (a description of the Eiffel language), Object Success (a discussion of object technology for managers), Reusable Software (a discussion of reuse issues and solutions), Introduction to the Theory of Programming Languages, Touch of Class (an introduction to programming and software engineering) and Agile! The Good, the Hype and the Ugly (a tutorial and critical analysis of agile methods). He has authored numerous articles and edited over 60 conference proceedings, many of them in the Springer LNCS (Lecture Notes in Computer Science) series. He has long being interested in techniques of specification and requirements and in 2022 published a treatise and textbook, Handbook of Requirements and Business Analysis (Springer). In 2024 he published, as editor, the volume The French School of Programming (Springer), containing chapters by 13 famous French or France-based computer scientists including Patrick Cousot, Thierry Coquand, Gérard Berry, and Meyer, describing their contributions (abstract interpretation, Rocq (former name: Coq), Esterel, Eiffel, etc.) in which Meyer sees, beyond the wide variety of approaches, a common taste for elegance and simplicity. 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. ==Contributions==

Meyer is known among other contributions for the following: • The concept of Design by Contract, highly influential as a design and programming methodology concept and a language mechanism present in such languages as the Java Modeling Language, Spec#, the UML's Object Constraint Language and Microsoft's Code Contracts. • The design of the Eiffel language, applicable to programming as well as design and requirements. • The early publication (in the first, 1988 edition of his Object-Oriented Software Construction book) of such widely used design patterns as the command pattern (the basis for undo-redo mechanisms, i.e. CTRL-Z/CTRL-Y, in interactive systems) and the bridge pattern. • The original design (in collaboration with Jean-Raymond Abrial and Steven Schuman) of the Z specification language. • His establishment of the connection between object-oriented programming and the concept of software reusability (in his 1987 paper Reusability: the Case for Object-Oriented Design). • His critical analysis of the pros and cons of agile development and his development of software lifecycle and management models. ==Awards==

Meyer is a member of Academia Europaea and the French Academy of Technologies and a Fellow of the ACM. He has received honorary doctorates from ITMO University in Saint Petersburg, Russia (2004) (returned in 2022) and the University of York, England (2015). He was the first "senior award" winner of the AITO Dahl-Nygaard award in 2005. This prize, named after the two founders of object-oriented programming, is awarded annually to a senior and a junior researcher who has made significant technical contributions to the field of OOP. ==Wikipedia hoax==

On 28 December 2005, an anonymous user falsely announced Meyer's death on the German Wikipedia's biography of Meyer. The hoax was reported five days later by the Heise News Ticker and the article was immediately corrected. Many major news media outlets in Germany and Switzerland picked up the story. Meyer went on to publish a positive evaluation of Wikipedia, concluding "The system succumbed to one of its potential flaws, and quickly healed itself. This doesn't affect the big picture. Just like those about me, rumors about Wikipedia's downfall have been grossly exaggerated." ==See also==