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SmartEiffel 1.0 Released
Per Wigren writes "Today SmartEiffel, the GNU Eiffel-compiler finally reached 1.0! Eiffel is a very underrated language in the free software community for some strange reason.. Hopefully this will help to gain some interest in this extremely powerful, fast, easy-to-read, easy-to-learn, almost self-debugging language!"
Any computer program can be expressed in C... why bother with crap...
Yeah, right.. while we're going down that slope at all, any computer program can be expressed as machine code, so why bother with assembly, C, VB, or any of that? Why bother with Photoshop when you can just do stuff pixel by pixel? I think you get the point..
slashdot!=valid HTML
"functional programming paradigm" ?
Unless things have changed substantially in the last few (um) time-units-of-your-choice, Eiffel is Object Oriented, not Functional.
I've not codes much (only a few KLOC) in Eiffel, but it is a very nice language with lots of help for producing programs that run. My biggest problem with it was that it tended to be a bit on the verbose side.
Real people don't depend on "teachers" to learn.
I was going to say "Real hackers don't depend on teachers to learn languages", but that's just a very isolated special case of the general principle.
If you honestly don't know anybody using something other then COBOL, Java, or a little C++, you are horribly, horribly disconnected from several exciting communities dedicated to increasing the power of the programmer. If you don't know the why multiple languages are useful, that is a grevious flaw in your education that you need to take immediate steps to rectify, and nobody's going to do it for you but you. Moreover, I don't mean to be offensive but you're so far behind you won't even understand the explanation of why you're behind; you need to be in the position of having used a couple of languages before you can understand comparisions!
Language differences are nothing like the difference between kde and gnome; it's more like the difference between GUI and CLI.
Don't wait for someone to teach you; you can't afford to while you're competing with people like me who know at least 10 languages well and can pick up a new one in a week (and I'm nothing special). I strongly suggest you rectify your ignorance.
'Course, if you don't, and you want to keep your attitude, no skin off my nose. That much less competition for me.
(*chuckle* I wish I could see you in an interview situation where someone asks about the differences between languages and you gave your post as the answer. They might not even bother to finish the interview.)
The whole point of this is you shouldn't be waiting for somebody else to look around for you, but here's some hints anyhow. I strongly suggest you spend a few months each on Perl, Python, a functional language like Haskell, and several APIs of some sort, like wxWindows or XML parsing. That's more educational then you might even think directly, since you'll get introduced to event-driven programming (though you may have seen it in Java), handling complicated data structures in general, and a lot of other useful things, not just "XML processing" and "GUI development". All of these things have great, free tutorials online.
Java and C# are particularly interesting in this regard because they not only support dynamic class/code loading, they also support it safely and with full reflection. That's really the future.
SmartEiffel, on the other hand, takes a static, global program analysis approach to compilation and optimization. It provides almost no reflection or dynamic loading (if you compile to JVM, you may be able to rig something up). I think ultimately, that makes it a fairly unattractive choice for many applications. Even the commercial Eiffel systems only had those features retrofitted over the last few years, which probably accounts in part for the very limited success of Eiffel as a language.
SmartEiffel is a really great concept, and for some niche applications, it is very useful (I have used it for some prototyping). I would very much like to see a safe, batch-compiled language catch on for Linux system programming as an alternative to C/C++. But I just don't think SmartEiffel is it, at least not yet.
Sather started as a free subset of Eiffel but then transmuted itself into a related but very different language.
Sather had great support for procedural pre and post conditions (not the aftermarket cheezy afterthought kind of thing that some languages seem to want to adopt), class invariants that could be automatically checked on call and return of a "public" method, class based iterators (not cursor classes, but built into the class itself), constrained genericity, simple (and relatively restricted) overloading ("a + b" became a.plus(b)), unboxed objects and so on....
Without formally measuring it, I'd guess that writing three more or less equivalent programs in Java, C++ and Sather would result in Sather having the lowest LOC count and the fastest development time. Though the tradeoffs were sometimes odd, good pre/post conditions saved me huge amounts of debugging and testing time, but required quite a bit more up front thought on what those conditions were - this resulted in much better code, but sometimes required interesting amounts of redesign.
Sadly, Sather, while still available here is GNU Sather is no longer being developed or supported AFAIK. Were I more of a compiler maven I'd work on it, but I doubt my efforts as a compiler writer would improve things much.
One of the things people should learn about OOP is when not to use it. If you force them to, they'll end up using it inappropriately.
Hey, I really cannot understand your animosity towards the development of new languages. At the very worst, you can are free to bury your head in the sand, ignore their existance, and go on with your life. At the best, this might be the perfect tool for you to do your programming with.
Now, there are very good reasons why a programmer, even someone who will never in their career look at something other than C, benefits from this work.
Computer Science is a continually evolving field (thats why universites have CS departments, filled with people doing research in CS). Because some computer scientists study programming languages, programming languages are evolving as well. This means that researchers keep introducing new and different features into new languages.
Of course, the vast majority of these new languages never become popular (or ever get used for even a single real program), but this collection of ideas influences more "mainstream" language. Things like classes, type-safety, generics, etc., all began as research ideas and then migrated into production systems. (Of course, Eiffel is well beyond the research language phase).
So even if you never adopt a cutting edge language, eventually, a tool you use will exist, or have been made better, because of that language.
Point is, instead of bitching you should be appreciative.