Bertrand Meyer is a programming language guru, computer scientist and arguably the uncle of object oriented programming Smiley. Bertrand created the Eiffel programming language. Eiffel is an object-oriented language that is based on a fixed set of powerful principles like Design by Contract and Command-Query Separation. It’s a very powerful language that has impacted the evolution of the more popular general purpose OO languages such as Java and C#. With the arrival of multi-core and soon-to-arrive many-core chipsets concurrency and parallelism are top-of-mind for general purpose language designers these days. Bertrand has introduced the SCOOP model on top of Eiffel. SCOOP is a comprehensive effort to make concurrent and distributed programming simple and safe, taking advantages of Eiffel’s object technology and Design by Contract. General purpose programming language designer and passionate functional programmig advocate Erik Meijer leads the discussion in this addition of Expert to Expert. You all know Erik by now. He’s one of our favorite technical celebrities. He and his small team of innovators continue to build great tools for software developers. Very special guest star and famous mathematical logician Yuri Gurevich joins us for the first half of the conversation (He happened to be in Bertrand’s office when we arrived – very lucky for us indeed!). This is a long conversation that I hope you eenjoy as much as I do. Find yourself some quality time to listen and learn from this chat amongst some the world’s finest programming thinkers.
