# Bertrand Meyer ![[50 Resources/51 Attachments/51.03 Public/2026-05-06 Bertrand Meyer.jpg|400]] Bertrand Meyer is a French computer scientist, professor, and author best known for designing the **Eiffel** programming language, formulating **Design by Contract**, and originating the [[Open Closed Principle (OCP)]] — three contributions that together shaped a generation of object-oriented software design thinking. His 1988 book *Object-Oriented Software Construction* (OOSC) is one of the foundational texts of OO programming and was nominated for the Jolt Award. He has held professorships at ETH Zurich (where he ran the Chair of Software Engineering for nearly two decades), Politecnico di Milano, and Innopolis University. He's also the founder of Eiffel Software and the author of dozens of books and papers spanning programming languages, formal methods, software process, and education. ## Key Contributions - **Eiffel programming language** (1985) — pure object-oriented language with built-in **Design by Contract** (preconditions, postconditions, invariants), genericity, and multiple inheritance. - **Design by Contract** — making correctness conditions an explicit, executable, inheritable part of the type system. The conceptual ancestor of modern type-driven design and a structural cousin of [[Liskov Substitution Principle (LSP)]]. - **[[Open Closed Principle (OCP)]]** — first formulated in *Object-Oriented Software Construction* (1988); later refined by [[Robert C. Martin]] using abstractions instead of inheritance. - **Uniform Access Principle** — calling code shouldn't be able to tell whether a feature is a stored attribute or a computed function. Influenced property syntax in many later languages. - **Single Choice Principle** — a related antecedent of OCP: when a system supports a set of alternatives, exactly one module should know the exhaustive list. ## Notable Books - *Object-Oriented Software Construction* (1988, 2nd ed. 1997) — the canonical reference; coined OCP, championed Design by Contract. - *Eiffel: The Language* (1991) - *Touch of Class: Learning to Program Well with Objects and Contracts* (2009) - *Agile! The Good, the Hype and the Ugly* (2014) - *Handbook of Requirements and Business Analysis* (2022) ## References - https://bertrandmeyer.com - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bertrand_Meyer - https://se.inf.ethz.ch/~meyer/ ## Related - [[Open Closed Principle (OCP)]] - [[SOLID Principles]] - [[Liskov Substitution Principle (LSP)]] - [[Single Responsibility Principle (SRP)]] - [[Robert C. Martin]]