Bertrand Meyer

Bertrand Meyer is a pioneer of software engineering and object technology. He is Professor of Software Engineering Emeritus and former head of the computer science department at ETH Zurich (Swiss Federal Institute of Technology) and CTO at Eiffel Software and Recognyze AI (Santa Barbara). 

Meyer is the inventor of "Design by Contract" (DbC) methodology and other well-established software principles such as Command-Query Separation. By integrating formal specifications—preconditions, postconditions, and invariants—directly into the programming process, DbC has fundamentally influenced modern software development and languages such as Java, C#, and UML. He was the original designer of the Eiffel language and environment, used in numerous mission-critical applications in finance and industry, and has trained thousands of programmers in modern design and programming methodology.

His research covers formal methods and proofs, language design, requirements, testing, project management. Two of his recent books (Springer) have become references in their fields: "Handbook of requirements and business analysis" and "Agile! The Good, the Hype and the Ugly", a tutorial and critique of agile methods.

Recent work addresses the impact of AI on software construction. His 2026 CACM article, "Artificial Intelligence for Software Engineering: From Probable to Provable," argues that while AI provides "probable" solutions through statistical inference, the critical nature of software requires the "provable" guarantees of formal verification.

He has conducted empirical research on AI-assisted programming, including the recent study "Do AI models help produce verified bug fixes?" which applies LLMs to Automatic Program Repair (APR) and identifies the "hallucination loop" phenomenon.

Educational Impact: His seminal work Object-Oriented Software Construction (Prentice Hall, Jolt Award winner) continues to shape computer science education. He taught introductory programming for 14 consecutive years at ETH Zurich, resulting in a widely used textbook, "Touch of Class: Learning to Program Well Using Objects and Contracts" (Springer).

Education: Meyer holds engineer degrees from École Polytechnique and ENST in Paris, an MSc from Stanford University and a PhD from the University of Nancy, as well as a master degree on Russian literature and linguistics from the Sorbonne.

ACM Involvement: an ACM member since his student days and former chair of ACM's French Chapter, he served on the ACM nominating committee (which proposes candidates for President and other offices) and numerous ACM conference committees. He was General Chair of ICSE (International Conf. on Software Engineering) and ESEC/FSE (ACM symposium on Foundations of Software Engineering). He has given keynotes at ICSE and other major ACM events, and several ACM Tech Talks. He is a prolific contributor to the CACM blog; his recent series on "Two Concepts of Intelligence" (2026) and "Criteria for Technical Definitions" (2025) provides a rigorous framework for discussing AI and technical excellence. 

His ACM awards include: Software System Award, ACM Fellow and ACM SIGSOFT Software Engineering Educator Award for his "inverted curriculum" approach to teaching programming.

Other awards include: membership in the French National Academy of Technologies and Academia Europaea, IFIP Fellow,IEEE Computer Society Harlan D. Mills Award, Jolt Award and Dahl-Nygaard Prize, and two honorary doctorates.

• Agile! The Good, the Hype and the Ugly
  This lecture provides a critical, de-hyped evaluation of Agile methodologies. It separates the "brilliant" contributions of Agile—such as continuous integration, refactoring, and...
• Artificial Intelligence for Software Engineering: From Probable to Provable
  This lecture addresses the fundamental paradigm shift in software construction introduced by Large Language Models (LLMs). While AI provides "probable" solutions through statistical...
• Auto-Active Verification: The AutoProof Approach to Program Proofs
  The "Grand Challenge" of verified software is to move beyond testing toward mathematical certainty. This lecture introduces AutoProof, a state-of-the-art static verifier for Eiffel that...
• Concurrency Simple and Safe: The SCOOP Model
  While multi-core processors have made concurrent programming essential, traditional threading models remain notoriously error-prone due to data races and deadlocks. This lecture presents SCOOP...
• The Inverted Curriculum: Teaching Programming from the Outside-In
  Based on fourteen years of introductory programming at ETH Zurich, this lecture details the "inverted curriculum" or "outside-in" approach. Rather than beginning with low-level...