Bertrand Meyer (; ) is a French academic, author, and consultant in the field of programming languages. He created the Eiffel language and the concept of design by contract.
Meyer pursues the ideal of simple, elegant and user-friendly computer languages and is one of the earliest and most vocal proponents of object-oriented programming (OOP). His book Object-Oriented Software Construction, translated into 15 languages, is one of the earliest and most comprehensive works presenting the case for OOP.
Other books he has written include Eiffel: The Language (a description of the Eiffel language), Object Success (a discussion of object technology for managers), Reusable Software (a discussion of reuse issues and solutions), Introduction to the Theory of Programming Languages, Touch of Class (an introduction to programming and software engineering) and Agile! The Good, the Hype and the Ugly (a tutorial and critical analysis of agile methods). He has authored numerous articles and edited over 60 conference proceedings, many of them in the Springer LNCS (Lecture Notes in Computer Science) series.
He has long being interested in techniques of specification and requirements and in 2022 published a treatise and textbook, Handbook of Requirements and Business Analysis (Springer).
In 2024 he published, as editor, the volume The French School of Programming (Springer), containing chapters by 13 famous French or France-based computer scientists including Patrick Cousot, Thierry Coquand, Gérard Berry, and Meyer, describing their contributions (abstract interpretation, Rocq (former name: Coq), Esterel, Eiffel, etc.) in which Meyer sees, beyond the wide variety of approaches, a common taste for elegance and simplicity.
His experiences with object technology through the Simula language, as well as early work on abstract data types and formal specification (including the Z notation), provided some of the background for the development of Eiffel.
Meyer is known among other contributions for the following:
Meyer is a member of Academia Europaea and the French Academy of Technologies and a Fellow of the ACM. He has received honorary doctorates from ITMO University in Saint Petersburg, Russia (2004) (returned in 2022) and the University of York, England (2015).
He was the first "senior award" winner of the AITO Dahl-Nygaard award in 2005. This prize, named after the two founders of object-oriented programming, is awarded annually to a senior and a junior researcher who has made significant technical contributions to the field of OOP.
He is the 2009 recipient of the IEEE Computer Society Harlan Mills award "for practical & fundamental contributions to object-oriented software engineering".
He is an IFIP fellow, as part of the first group to receive this distinction in 2019, and received in 2017 the ACM SIGSOFT Software Engineering Educator Award. He was the recipient of an ERC (European Research Council) Advanced Investigator Grant (2012-2017).
In 2006, Meyer received the ACM Software System Award of the for "impact on software quality" in recognition of the design of Eiffel.
On 28 December 2005, an anonymous user falsely announced Meyer's death on the German Wikipedia's biography of Meyer. The hoax was reported five days later by the Heise News Ticker and the article was immediately corrected. Many major news media outlets in Germany and Switzerland picked up the story. Meyer went on to publish a positive evaluation of Wikipedia, concluding "The system succumbed to one of its potential flaws, and quickly healed itself. This doesn't affect the big picture. Just like those about me, rumors about Wikipedia's downfall have been grossly exaggerated."