[Review] "The Positive Spin" by Bertrand Meyer

2011-09-19T15:38:00.000-07:00

Today, while I was looking for some information concerning UML, I found this incredible article, written by Bertrand Meyer (creator of the Eiffel language). It's basically written (in a satirical way) as a fictional email that a fictional professor, Professor Stern, receives from one of his fictional students, Candide Smith.

Candide Smith is going to win a D- in his grade of the object orientation class this professor gives, after commenting in his final exam that "there may have been other things between sliced bread and Java", and because in his term paper "An evaluation of the proposed Unified Modeling Language (UML)" he expressed critics about UML without describing anything positive about this model.

This student is so desperate to win a better grade in Professor Stern's class, that he enters a quixotic adventure, trying to find any positive point about UML to deserve an increase in his D-, from the professor.

I recommend reading the article. It gives us a view about other perspectives about UML, because in my experience as CS student, I usually encounter just UML-loving literature, and its difficult to find more objective views. The only book I've read, concerning UML, which had an objective view (in Chapter 11, which was the one I read) was More About Software Requirements by Karl Wiegers, which referred to the philosophical question some of us had made to ourselves after entering the software requirements area: When are use cases the best way (or a possible one) to gather and analyze software requirements? But well, I'll write another entry for that matter.

Bertrand Meyer's article, The Positive Spin, is available at this link. Hope you guys enjoy the reading as I did!

- Kzz

First entry

2011-09-19T14:31:00.000-07:00

This is the first entry at the blog, so I'm going to explain a bit of what is its reason of being.

Random Quantum will be a blog to publish interesting news, opinions and other info, mainly about computing and other areas of technology. Everything will be related to computers, and the world of knowledge computer scientists, students, developers and software project managers are involved in.

Hope this blog is of help, with interesting info, and entertaining for you all.

- Kzz