Bertrand Meyer Quotes

Perfect reusable components are not obtained at the first shot.

C++ is the only current language making COBOL look good

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.