The French School of Programming:A Personal View

Although France has never been a world leader in the software industry, Computer science research has traditionally been at a worldwide level there, thanks to the Universities, the CNRS and Inria and to some researchers abroad. This book is devoted to important parts of the French field of programming languages, essential since program texts are the only way to drive computers. That research almost always tried to link mathematical rigor with practical concerns—an old French tradition. This has been particularly true for the development and linking of new and clean programming languages and formal verification systems, often created and linked together with the solid base of their mathematical semantics and their theorems. Such formal semantics served and still serve as a consistency guide during the design and implementation development, instead of being only addons by other people after the fact, as too often done with much less efficiency. This introductory chapter surveys the 12 subsequent chapters, each dedicated to a particular technical approach or language and written by their team leaders. It ends by myself telling in a nontechnical way how my own 50-years career dealt with the creation of a few original and mathematically well-studied theoretical frameworks and practical languages. Named Esterel, the last one has led to the creation in 2000 of a successful company that has become a world-leader in the field of certified software for safety-critical reactive systems (it also led to some success in industrial hardware design and verification, a successful application domain unfortunately killed by the 2008 financial crisis). Of course, this is not a single-man story, by far, and I also try to tell the associated social story with some humor because it was a lot of fun for me, and for my groups I hope.