Meet Bertrand Meyer, inventor of the sleek and powerful programming language, Eiffel, and outstanding author of many fine geek texts. Bertrand, we're all clamboring to know:
- What is
your programming language of choice?
Eiffel for any significant application.
- What is
your favorite operating system?
It does not really exist. I have a love-hate relationship with Windows, but mostly when I have a choice I use SunOS 4.1.4. I must be the last user on earth.
- Do you
have a hero or role model?
Fortunately I can think of quite a few. The most obvious are people who dedicated their lives to the advancement of knowledge, the progress of freedom, and the removal of superstition; and managed to remain decent individuals in their own lives too:
Voltaire. Denis Diderot. Albert Einstein. Louis Pasteur. Galileo Galilei. Heinrich Heine. Aleksandr Pushkin. Andrei Sakharov. Moses Maimonide. Leon Blum. Leonardo da Vinci. Ludwig van Beethoven. Moses Mendelssohn. Emile Zola. Jean Moulin. Albert Camus. Erasmus. Vaclav Havel. Jules Ferry.
The Germans who stood up to Hitler. All of the Danish people, during World War II. De Gaulle and Churchill. Resistance fighters. The survivors of Auschwitz.
Joseph Nassi and his aunt Gracia Mendes. The Rothschilds.
In computing: Tony Hoare, Jean-Raymond Abrial, Edsger Dijkstra, Donald Knuth, John McCarthy, Bob Floyd, Kristen Nygaard, David Parnas, Jean Ichbiah.
- What is
your favorite kind of music?
Mozart, Rossini, Offenbach, Schubert, Mendelssohn, Schumann, Beethoven, Haydn, Hummel, Verdi, Bellini, early Stravinsky, Faure, Franck, Berlioz, Bizet, Gretry, Auber, Milhaud, Mahler, Strauss (the Johanns, of course), Chopin, Gottschalk, Dvorak, Smetana, young Wagner up to F. H.
- What is
your favorite news group?
I haven't read many newsgroups recently for lack of time. I have seldom seen elsewhere the quality of some of the early discussions on comp.lang.eiffel until about 1995.
- What is
your favorite web page (besides geekchic!)?
Altavista is great. Newspapers: www.lemonde.fr, www.lastampa.it. www.ucmp.berkeley.edu as a good example of an effective educational site. http://eiffel.com http://tools.com http://talkitover.com, a great communication mechanism.
- What sports
do you enjoy?
Skiing, sailing.
- What kind
of car do you drive?
Whatever is small, non-flashy, least polluting, least gas-hungry. At the moment it is a Geo Metro. It may not be geek but I find it chic. 54 miles a gallon.
- What hobbies
do you enjoy outside of work?
Thinking about my work. Writing. Reading well-written books, whether literary or scientific. Listening to opera. Watching opera live. Watching opera on cassette. Thinking about opera.
- What is
your favorite book (or author)?
I would be very depressed to have to choose just one. Anything by Pushkin or Chekhov. Almost anything by Stendhal, Flaubert, Proust, Voltaire, Diderot, Balzac, Maupassant, Zola, Perec, Albert Cohen, Camus, Colette, Nathalie Sarraute, Marguerite Yourcenar. Montesquieu, Rousseau. Moliere. Simone de Beauvoir. Sartre. La Bruyere. Racine, even Corneille. Borges. Goethe, Heine. Rabelais. Tolstoy, Lermontov, Bulgakov, Pasternak. Kawabata. Ronsard, Du Bellay, Baudelaire, Verlaine, Apollinaire, Nerval. Petrarque. Bachelard. Barthes. Italo Calvino, Dino Buzzatti. Casanova's memoirs.
Computing science writing too, by the people who write well: Hoare, Dijkstra, Knuth, Abrial.
- What is
your favorite movie?
All of Jean-Pierre Ponnelle's opera movies (Cenerentola, Nozze di Figaro, Barbiere di Siviglia, Cosi fan Tutte). It's hard to beat that. Just the last five minutes of "Cenerentola" are worth a good 50,000 other films.
"Andrei Rublev", "Les Enfants du Paradis", "Allonsanfan", "La Guerre est finie", "L'Annee derniere a Marienbad". Almost anything by Fellini or with Mastroianni in it. "Tampopo", "A Taxing Woman" etc. Pagnol movies.
- What sort
of clothing do you usually wear to work?
?
- What is
your favorite food?
I can be pretty fussy but as a matter of fact I care more about the people with whom I am eating.
geekchic@geekchic.com