Eiffel Programming Contest Deadline Nears

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."

Comments

One of those criteria should be..

[QuantumG]

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

Re:One of those criteria should be..

[berenddeboer]

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.

sarcasm lost..

[QuantumG]

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.

Re:Install SmartEiffel.

[WTFmonkey]

Methinks the $1400 will not be yours...

Re:Install SmartEiffel.

[berenddeboer]

There is a mailing list. Haven't heard of any trouble. What OS are you using?

Who uses eiffel industrily?

[whitelines]

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)

Re:Who uses eiffel industrily?

[berenddeboer]

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.

Re:Who uses eiffel industrily?

[Milnok]

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.