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

Bertrand Meyer

Careful as they may be, developers of Eiffel libraries will always run into cases in which, after releasing a library class, they suddenly experience what in French is called esprit de l’escalier or wit of the staircase: a great thought which unfortunately is an afterthought.
BERTRAND MEYER

Clever Party Running
Like a clever reply that would have stunned all the other dinner guests – if only you had thought of it before walking down the stairs after the party is over
BERTRAND MEYER

Guest Only Over Party Stairs
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

Celebrate Facts Use
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

Bridges Engineering Writing
Ask not first what the system does; ask what it does it to!
BERTRAND MEYER

Doe Firsts Program
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

Correctness Littles Quality System
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

Debate Fighting Opinion
Software entities (classes, modules, functions, etc.) should be open for extension, but closed for modification.
BERTRAND MEYER

Class Entitles Functions
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

Gears Running Thinking
Incorrect documentation is often worse than no documentation.
BERTRAND MEYER

Computer Documentation Programmer Programming
C++ is the only current language making COBOL look good
BERTRAND MEYER

Cobol Language Looks
Constants are widely known for the detestable practice of changing their values; we should prepare ourselves against the consequences of such fickleness
BERTRAND MEYER

Detestable Known Practice
The role of a trainer or consultant is to empower the customer, not to make himself indispensable
BERTRAND MEYER

Empowering Indispensable Roles
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

Found Language Used
Perfect reusable components are not obtained at the first shot.
BERTRAND MEYER

Firsts Perfect Programming
You can either have software quality or you can have pointer arithmetic, but you cannot have both at the same time.
BERTRAND MEYER

Computer Quality Technology

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

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

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