Re: Critique of Ariane 5 paper (finally!)

[Ken Garlington <kennieg@flash.net>]

Bertrand Meyer wrote:
> 
> Samuel Mize wrote:
> 
> > > But to make the jump from sufficient to necessary is completely
> > > without basis, and can only be regarded as advertising puffery.
> >
> > Which appeared in a column in IEEE Computer magazine, positioning
> > it deceptively as a technical item instead of an ad.
> 
> This is outrageous. The article in question suggested a technical
> principle (Design by Contract) to avoid new occurrences
> of a documented major disaster. It did not mention any
> software product.

Except Eiffel, of course. It went on to contrast Eiffel with other
competing product lines. The fact that you were identified as
"Bertrand Meyer, EiffelSoft" didn't help either. (Not your fault,
of course, but it adds to the perception).

Contrast this, for example, to your outstanding article on object
taxonomies. Although you used Eiffel for your examples, nowhere
did you say, "and Eiffel is much better than Java, Ada, etc. at
expressing these taxonomies."

You have to agree that someone who makes money selling books and
products for both DBC and Eiffel should be both conservative and
balanced in their claims, to avoid the _appearance_ (and I stress
appearance, because I'm not suggesting you intentionally meant to
advertise your products) of a conflict of interest.

> IEEE Computer and other magazines
> publish thousand of pages suggesting technical solutions
> to problems -- often, in fact, advocating products
> and companies. Is any argument for CORBA, or OLE, or UML, or
> Unix, or Windows to be dismissed as as "deceptive",
> an "ad" and not a "technical item"?
> 
> For example the June issue of IEEE Computer included a 6-page
> eulogy of Java by its creator, James Gosling. Is this a
> deceptive ad too? After all, unlike the Ariane paper, it does
> talk throughout about its author's company (Sun) and products
> (Solaris etc.) 

Given that you have described his argument as a "eulogy," then
I guess the answer is yes, you can dismiss (or at least question)
an argument where there is a perception of strong bias
(particularly financial gain). I know I question some of the
claims made by Java, as do you (see, for example):

            NEWS ITEM OF THE WEEK: 
   MICROSOFT DECLARES WAR ON JAVA PORTABILITY

at http://www.eiffel.com, "NEW" index item.

> But if we barred technical advocacy, IEEE
> Computer and other magazines would soon become rather boring
> places. Fortunately I don't think that's going to happen.
> 
> The underlying issue is what we do to improve software
> reliability, and that's not going to be resolved by
> gratuitous attacks.

Well said!

Having put the gratuitous attacks aside, I would appreciate
your review and comments on my paper at:

  http://www.flash.net/~kennieg/ariane.html

which, to the best of my ability, contains no gratuitous
attacks of any kind.

> 
> --
> Bertrand Meyer, President, ISE Inc.
> ISE Building, 2nd floor, 270 Storke Road, Goleta CA 93117
> 805-685-1006, fax 805-685-6869, <Bertrand.Meyer@eiffel.com>
> http://www.eiffel.com, with instructions for free download