Bertrand Meyer

Bertrand Meyer is a computer scientist, author, and pioneer in software engineering. He is the initial designer of the Eiffel programming language and the originator of Design by Contract, a method for building software that is more reliable, robust, and maintainable.

He is Chief Architect of Eiffel Software, the company he founded in 1985, and CEO of Recognyze AI. He is Professor Emeritus of Software Engineering at ETH Zurich, where he was Professor of Software Engineering from 2001 to 2016 and Chairman of the Department of Computer Science from 2004 to 2006.

Meyer has spent more than four decades working at the intersection of programming languages, software engineering, artificial intelligence, formal methods, and software quality. He led the evolution of Eiffel and the development of the EiffelStudio development environment, compiler, tools, and libraries.

His latest book, AI for Smarties: Understanding Artificial Intelligence, brings his experience as a computer scientist and educator to one of the most important and misunderstood technologies of our time. The book explains the fundamental ideas behind artificial intelligence—including machine learning, neural networks, large language models, and generative AI—while examining what today's AI systems can and cannot do.

Meyer is also the author of Handbook of Requirements and Business Analysis (Springer, 2023), a comprehensive treatment of requirements engineering, and Agile! The Good, the Hype and the Ugly (Springer, 2014), a critical examination of agile development.

His influential books include Object-Oriented Software Construction, winner of the 1998 Jolt Award; Eiffel: The Language; Object Success; Reusable Software; and Touch of Class: Learning to Program Well, Using Object Technology and Contracts.

Meyer is an ACM Fellow and IFIP Fellow, a member of the Academia Europaea and the French National Academy of Technologies, and the recipient of the ACM Software System Award, the IEEE Harlan D. Mills Prize for Software Engineering, the Dahl-Nygaard Prize, and two honorary doctorates. In 2026, he was elected to the inaugural class of the ACM SIGSOFT Software Engineering Academy, recognizing his lasting contributions to software engineering.

Before founding Eiffel Software, Meyer spent nine years in technical and managerial positions at Électricité de France (EDF) and three years on the faculty of the University of California, Santa Barbara. His early work with the Simula programming language, abstract data types, and formal specification helped provide the foundation for the development of Eiffel.

Throughout his career, Bertrand Meyer has combined research, teaching, software development, and writing, with a consistent focus on one central question: how can we build software that is not only powerful, but also understandable, reliable, and correct.