Slashdot Mirror
Eiffel Programming Contest Results
Berend de Boer writes "NICE, the nonprofit International Consortium for Eiffel, has announced the results of its fifth International Eiffel Programming Contest. This year had cash prizes of up to 1400 USD and software valued up to $8000 USD. There were 17 entries. The top scores were:ePalm, bringing Eiffel to PalmOS; ewg, generating C code binding glue; and Hbchess, a chess engine."
Technically, ePalm sounds like it might be a good thing. SmartEiffel, which it is based on, can generate quite compact native code even from large, object-oriented libraries because it performs global optimizations; that makes it a better choice than VM-based systems like Java or .NET. Furthermore, PalmOS doesn't isolate programs very well from one another, so a language like Eiffel, with built-in garbage collection and error checking, has a real advantage over C.
Still, SuperWaba probably fills that niche well enough and Palm handhelds are getting powerful enough so that the advantages of ePalm won't be big enough to let it catch on.
Unfortunately, "maintainability" is a bit of a difficult feature to show off in the Real World(tm) too where usually managers prefer to dictate their teams to write on Perl, C++ and Java.
By the way, the code written on OCAML or OHaskell is even more readable. Not to mention that both language are specially designed (as many other FPL) to make possible formal math verification and validation that the program does the right thing and it does it right. The feature that barely can be beaten from maintainability prospective.
Less is more !
The only project that might get other peoples attention and attract newcomers to eiffel would be a large-scale development project. Maybe if the Mars rover system software was written in eiffel, more people might go, "Hmmmmm..." And take a peek at eiffel.
There's really no Eiffel projects that a single developer can write (in his or her spare time) that cannot already be done in C++ or Java. Eiffel's virtues are evident only when programming in the large.
At the moment, the best thing going for Eiffel has been the book "Object Oriented Software Construction" and its famous author. This book is very convincing to quaility minded developers, who immediately appreciate the beauty of the language, even if they will probably never get a change to use it at work.