Bertrand Meyer Quotes

#1. C++ is the only current language making COBOL look good

Bertrand Meyer

#2. To focus on the visible at the expense of the essential is irresponsible.

Bertrand Meyer

#3. Constants are widely known for the detestable practice of changing their values; we should prepare ourselves against the consequences of such fickleness

Bertrand Meyer

#4. The role of a trainer or consultant is to empower the customer, not to make himself indispensable

Bertrand Meyer

#5. The Scrum idea of a separated Scrum Master is good for Scrum, but not appropriate for most projects. Good development requires not just talkers but doers.

Bertrand Meyer

#6. As Mr. Nagle so competently points out, almost no one uses Eiffel; in fact until recently there were only 9 users. But now a 10th person just started, so we are holding a conference, appropriately titled the TENTH Eiffel USER conference, to celebrate.

Bertrand Meyer

#7. Eiffel borrows quite openly from several earlier programming languages and I am sure that if we had found a good language construct in C we would have used it as well.

Bertrand Meyer

#8. I have always felt sympathy towards the biologists who accept to debate creationists. Now I also understand them better; one can fight opinions, not articles of faith.

Bertrand Meyer

#9. I think Smalltalk is inappropriate for serious industrial developments. After all, run time is a little late to find out whether you have a landing gear.

Bertrand Meyer

#10. You can either have software quality or you can have pointer arithmetic, but you cannot have both at the same time.

Bertrand Meyer

#11. Incorrect documentation is often worse than no documentation.

Bertrand Meyer

#12. Writing a class without its contract would be similar to producing an engineering component (electrical circuit, VLSI (Very Large Scale Integration) chip, bridge, engine ... ) without a spec. No professional engineer would even consider the idea.

Bertrand Meyer

#13. Correctness is clearly the prime quality. If a system does not do what it is supposed to do, then everything else about it matters little.

Bertrand Meyer

#14. Software entities (classes, modules, functions, etc.) should be open for extension, but closed for modification.

Bertrand Meyer

#15. Perfect reusable components are not obtained at the first shot.

Bertrand Meyer

#16. Ask not first what the system does; ask what it does it to!

Bertrand Meyer