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Eiffel as a Gnome Development Language ?
Thomas Delaet writes "
This article is a short evaluation of Eiffel as a language for developing the core gnome desktop platform. Last month, there has been a heavy debate about a successor for C/C++ as the language of choice for developing the core gnome desktop components in. The debate has mostly focussed around C#/Mono and Java. This article tries to summarize the different requirements for a gnome development language and shows how Eiffel fits in these criteria."
The Eiffel language may be a good choice for GNOME apps, but wouldn't running a Windows app written in Eiffel 6.5 result in the Blue Da Ba Dee Screen of Death?
Actually, Eiffel is rarely seen IN academia - compsci academia, anyway. Eiffel is marketed strongly at "computing for business" types, you know, the ones who buy into the OO, software engineering hype, and write 30000 line monstrosities where a 12 line shell script would do, then go off and "refactor" for another six months and USD500000 budget to produce...the same thing, sliced slightly differently.
Compscis use stuff like ML and Haskell, while slagging off other compscis who use Common Lisp or Scheme for not having static typing (while the lispers slate the MLers for missing the point because all the interesting lisp programs don't _know_ what types are appropriate ahead of time in their view), and they all slag off the goons using Java to get funding from corporate types.
Actually, Eiffel is a region in Germany :P
Hey, I'm an American, all I care about is beer and titties, so don't talk to me about no geography.
God Bless this country! Iraq must be licking our ball sack right now, they're so thankful.
Actually, Eiffel is a region in Germany :P
Whereas France is only sometimes a region in Germany.
Eiffel? Why bother? There is a much better language out there that's already being used heavily on the GNOME platform, along with other platforms like KDE.
What language, you ask?
English!
English is an easy-to-learn and powerful language. A large number of developers already know this language, and there are many tools available to translate it to/from other languages.
English is a robust and mature language, as well. It's been in use for hundreds of years and its capabilities are well-known and understood by many. Try and match that with some ten-year-old language created by hairy UNIX administrators!
Compilers and documentation for English are easy to get a copy of, and many are completely free or very affordable. Almost every college out there offers courses in English.
There are many powerful IDEs available for English - OpenOffice, Microsoft Word, the list goes on.
Unlike languages like Java and French, there is no central committee that says what English can and cannot 'do'. You're free to explore the potential of the language and come up with new instructions and invent new ways to use existing instructions.
I honestly cannot believe that English has been overlooked in this debate. It's a perfect fit for GNOME.
using namespace slashdot;
troll::post();
I sit corrected and wish to exchange the Interesting and any possible Insightful moderations I got for my original post for a few Funny and an Overrated.
Money for nothing, pix for free
I thought that since C got it's start with BCPL that the replacement was going to be P.
personally I think "The [G/K/Q]ommunity" should find a way to Embrace, Extend, Extinguish both Java and C#...with their own standard.
In the interim preprocess both the highest level code (and/or bytecodes) into [G/K/Q]NU native format.
Run the resulting bytecodes on the "[G/K/Q]LR/[G/K/Q]LI".
Now is the time to out-FUD, out-EEE both Microsoft and Sun. IBM and Novell should step up to the plate and make it happen.
What we really saw last week was not Sun Micro joining MS, instead they are cowering in fear of IBM, and made a really shitty choice of running to satan for cover. This is going to cause the open side many, many problems down the road. But hey, as long as ballmer and mcnealy are golfing together, maybe RMS could be their caddy?
It doesn't support internationalisation.