Eiffel Programming Contest Deadline Nears

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Eiffel Programming Contest Deadline Nears

Posted by timothy on Sunday October 12, 2003 @12:22PM from the or-they-suck-your-blood dept.

berenddeboer writes "Slightly more than two weeks left to polish up your Eiffel application or library and submit it to the world-wide Eiffel 2003 contest, the infamous Eiffel Class Struggle. As previously reported here the closing date is October 31. You can use any Eiffel compiler such as the GNU Eiffel compiler SmartEiffel. The top cash prize is $1400 USD. Entries are judged according to 12 criteria by an international panel of judges."

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One of those criteria should be.. by QuantumG · 2003-10-12 12:27 · Score: 1

"How much of a mockery you have made of inheritence".. At least then you'd be in the same league as Bertrand Meyer.

--
How we know is more important than what we know.
1. Re:One of those criteria should be.. by berenddeboer · 2003-10-12 13:43 · Score: 1
  
  QuantumG, nothing in your message is very specific. If you want me to add another criteria, it might be helpful to come up with a detailed response that might allow a jury to make an unanimous decision.
  
  --
  If I had a sig, I would put it here.
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Welcome to GNU GVideo GProfessor! by Anonymous Coward · 2003-10-12 12:43 · Score: 0

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sarcasm lost.. by QuantumG · 2003-10-12 15:01 · Score: 1

I was actually having a dig at Bertrand Meyer's use of adhoc inheritence. Looking at the standard library, he'd feel no guilt about creating a class called "fish" that inherits from a class called "dog" if it ment that he could reuse the "swim" function.

--
How we know is more important than what we know.
1. Re:sarcasm lost.. by Charlton+Heston · 2003-10-12 16:38 · Score: 0, Troll
  
  Wow, judging by that link you weren't kidding when you said that you were gobbling a lot more cock lately.
  
  --
  Get your stinking paws off me you damn dirty ape
2. Re:sarcasm lost.. by Anonymous Coward · 2003-10-13 02:13 · Score: 0
  
  ROTFL.
  
  I had the exact same feeling while reading one of his books a decade ago.
  
  Then I found Objective-C, which standard library, even if it have some things backward (like a mutable array is an immutable array that changes), is much nicer.
3. Re:sarcasm lost.. by Anonymous Coward · 2003-10-13 08:22 · Score: 0
  
  Gee, that might actually be reasonable and useful. No, instead, Meyer seems to have misunderstood programming as some kind of 19th century botanical exercise, in which excessive use of scientific forms is more important than actual function.
  
  Keep in mind, the guy made some very serious blunders in the type system of his language; he isn't a language designer. Fortunately, the language is slowly dying under its own weight.
if ya really wanna know.. by QuantumG · 2003-10-12 19:12 · Score: 0, Offtopic

email me.

--
How we know is more important than what we know.
Install SmartEiffel. by Anonymous Coward · 2003-10-12 20:09 · Score: 0

Could someone walk me through installing smarteiffel ?
Doing what the guide says just fails..
1. Re:Install SmartEiffel. by WTFmonkey · 2003-10-13 08:17 · Score: 1
  
  Methinks the $1400 will not be yours...
2. Re:Install SmartEiffel. by berenddeboer · 2003-10-13 13:03 · Score: 1
  
  There is a mailing list. Haven't heard of any trouble. What OS are you using?
  
  --
  If I had a sig, I would put it here.
Eiffel.com by Anonymous Coward · 2003-10-12 21:26 · Score: 0

Eiffel is a nice language and it seems like it has a nice community too.

But don't forget, that eiffel.com are spammers, once you've registered there, you'll get mail until you ditch your mail address and get a another one. Attempts to unregister will go unnoticed by them.
Critique A by Anonymous Coward · 2003-10-13 13:20 · Score: 0

Critique of Bertrand Meyer's famous Eiffel intro book
Who uses eiffel industrily? by whitelines · 2003-10-13 23:27 · Score: 1

Just wondering who and what for?
Why use it when the user/library base is so small?
I had friends at another uni who used it as a teaching language(I had blue, which is similar, but clunkier), but once they understood OO moved onto Java (we moved to C++, some move)

--
/* TBD */
1. Re:Who uses eiffel industrily? by berenddeboer · 2003-10-14 06:42 · Score: 1
  
  What is small? If you rather would deliver products without bugs, and there is a huge payoff here, you should have a look at Eiffel. It really supports a better style of programming. There are two commercial Eiffel compilers and one Open Source compiler. There must be hundreds of companies using it and thousands of programmers. You ain't gonna get a competitive edge if you use the same language as everyone else.
  
  If you are a startup, you usually don;'t have a second chance. You don't have the luxury of Microsoft or Linux (SSH/sendmail/wu-ftp/...) programmers, who can use C/C++ and get away with buggy or insecure code and patch later. Will the programmers in your company produce better code with C++ than Microsoft does? That's hardly likely. Will they with a pure, clean language that supports Design by Contract?
  
  Take for example the interview with Bjarne Stroustrup:
  
  My rule of thumb is that you should have a real class with an interface and a hidden representation if and only if you can consider an invariant for the class.
  
  That is exactly Eiffel's position. But not only that, it allows you to write that invariant and it will make sure that upon violating that invariant you get an exception. That really helps, instead of having some abstract invariant or precondition that is burried in the documentation and which you only detect when your 500 million dollar rocket has blown up.
  
  And Eiffel is infectious. People who use it and who got its ideas, don't even want to go back to inferior languages.
  
  But for more information see the Eiffel Cetus pages.
  
  --
  If I had a sig, I would put it here.
2. Re:Who uses eiffel industrily? by Milnok · 2003-10-16 06:14 · Score: 1
  
  Unfortunately, the Eiffel Cetus page is hopelessly out of date. About half of the links are dead or useless. Try any link from the "Articles by Bertrand Meyer" or the "Halstenbach GmbH" section, only to mention two examples.
Eiffel by Anonymous Coward · 2003-10-14 07:53 · Score: 0

I'm blue-ba-da-dee-ba....