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<b>T</b><b>he French School of Programming</b>&nbsp;is a collection of insightful discussions of programming and software engineering topics, by some of the most prestigious names of French computer science.&nbsp;The authors include several of the originators&nbsp;of such widely acclaimed inventions as abstract interpretation, the Caml, OCaml and Eiffel programming languages, the Coq proof assistant, agents and modern testing techniques.<p>The book is divided into four parts: Software Engineering (A), Programming Language Mechanisms and Type Systems (B), Theory (C), and Language Design and Programming Methodology (D). They are preceded by a Foreword by Bertrand Meyer, the editor of the volume, a Preface by Jim Woodcock providing an outsider’s appraisal of the French school’s contribution, and an overview chapter by Gérard Berry, recalling his own intellectual journey. Chapter 2, by Marie-Claude Gaudel, presents a 30-year perspective on the evolution of testing starting with her own seminal work. In chapter 3, Michel Raynal covers distributed computing with an emphasis on simplicity. Chapter 4, by Jean-Marc Jézéquel, former director of IRISA, presents the evolution of modeling, from CASE tools to SLE and Machine Learning. Chapter 5, by Joëlle Coutaz, is a comprehensive review of the evolution of Human-Computer Interaction. In part B, chapter 6, by Jean-Pierre Briot, describes the sequence of abstractions that led to the concept of agent. Chapter 7, by Pierre-Louis Curien, is a personal account of a journey through fundamental concepts of semantics, syntax and types. In chapter 8, Thierry Coquand presents “some remarks on dependent type theory”. Part C begins with Patrick Cousot’s personal historical perspective on his well-known creation, abstract interpretation, in chapter 9. Chapter 10, by Jean-Jacques Lévy, is devoted to tracking redexes in the Lambda Calculus. The final chapter of that part, chapter 11 by Jean-Pierre Jouannaud, presents advances in rewriting systems, specifically the confluence of terminating rewriting computations. Part D contains two longer contributions. Chapter 12 is a review by Giuseppe Castagna of a broad range of programming topics relying on union, intersection and negation types. In the final chapter, Bertrand Meyer covers “ten choices in language design” for object-oriented programming, distinguishing between “right” and “wrong” resolutions of these issues and explaining the rationale behind Eiffel’s decisions.<br></p><p>This book will be of special interest to anyone with an interest in modern views of programming — on such topics as programming language design, the relationship between programming and type theory, object-oriented principles, distributed systems, testing techniques, rewriting systems, human-computer interaction, software verification… — and in the insights of a brilliant group of innovators in the field.</p>