[T]he story told in this article is
one of glaring, unremitted and probably
definitive failure.
“”” Still, one should not lie. The outcomes that matter in research are not numerous publications, best-paper awards, completed PhD theses, keynote invitations, soft- ware tools, citations and other measurable signs of progress. I was after real success, in the sense of changing the way the IT industry develops software. That was the only justification for putting in parentheses my career as a technology entrepreneur. When you have an ambitious goal, you should be judged by that goal. Such absurd pieties as “it’s the journey that matters” or “what’s important is to participate” (by, of all people, Coubertin, founder of modern Olympics) are even more wrong in research than anywhere else. Only the result counts. By that standard, the story told in this article is one of glaring, unremitted and probably definitive failure. “””
Reports of success in those areas combined with what's in this document might allow people to develop hybrid approaches that get stuff done along both axises. As partial confirmation, we've already seen some of the same types of tooling that Eiffel has develop in .NET and Java spaces. Companies pay a lot of money for them, too. Still potential to repeat some of ETH's success with integrated tooling for other mainstream languages mixing tech that benefits various aspects of the software lifecycle. The releases could be a mix of proprietary tools that generate funding plus FOSS components that keep a strong ecosystem of contributors.
I imagine that this document was written to a target audience, propbably so as to satify some funder's requirement, e.g. as 'post-mortem' for his ERC grants. Audiences have expectations as to what can and cannot be said. Funding organisations want/need success stories. Honesty is not always appropriate see e.g. yesterday's [1]. Honesty needs 'padding'. Meyer had numerous students, and his last sentence makes a statement about their professional work too.
Well, I think the phrase "glaring, unremitted and probably definitive failure" is not one of modest honesty, and if he would have wanted to be politically correct, he could have definitely phrased it differently. (Just trying to look at this objectively).