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EiffelStudio Goes Open
WeiszNet writes "Bertrand Meyer, the creator of Eiffel the language and CTO of Eiffel Software in Santa Barbara, CA has announced in his Software Architecture course at ETH Zurich that the company's flagship product - EiffelStudio was released under the GPL today. Here is the press release: and the project's page.
Eiffel is an object oriented programming language supporting contracts. Last year the international standard (ECMA) for Eiffel was released and now the initiative to go open has been taken."
Alright! Another Eiffel story means I've now paid only $10 for each time I've heard or thought about Eiffel since school forced me to buy the book all those years ago. At least it wasn't Java, I guess.
I happed to take a course that taught among other things how to program in Eiffel, and the contract principle is in fact very nice. When you write a contract, you define exactly what you want want to pass to a feature.. err... function and exactly what you want to get from it. I know, every good programmer has to write down specification anyway, may be even in clever mathematical form. Still, contracting scheme helps to avoid lots of stupid errors, and when you are sure you're done, just turn off contract checking in the compiler. After some time, I started thinking in terms of contracts, and it would be great feature in next revision of C++. I'm writing this because there are many features that I do not like in eiffel, and in EiffelStudio (you can download free version for most of the platforms). In general, the language is very restrictive, and allows no freedom whatsoever - you can use classes, only classes and nothing but classes and you will use them exactly the way it's creators want you to, e.g. No break statements. Also it is slow - when developing applications - eiffel code is translated to C, then C code is compiled. So on average you'd get 80 Mbyte project for every 500K of code. And finally Eiffel has arcane Pascale-like syntax, it could've been much simpler. Adding insult to injury, EiffelStudio, the IDE if you ever try to program in eifffel(I know, RTFA), is very annoying, if you made a mistake in the code and attempted to save it, studio will make a pop up window informing you about it, if you try to look inside anther class while having an error inside the current one, the studio will abruptly return you to the line where you made a mistake, even if you need to switch to a different class to fix the error. It, also, doesn't have context menu, the right mouse button is used for other purposes, e.g. view single function from other viewer inside the studio in a debug mode (don't ask me why), or moving around the code - double right click on class declaration will move you to the class definition, this actually is really nice, except, why makers of eiffel never thought about middle mouse button?! Though, debugger is nice. I think Eiffel is 1984 of programming languages, and an attempt to popularize it would not help, anyhow free version of EiffelStudio has been around a while, and it is not like anyone would suddenly begin to develop many applications using it.
I'm not going to hold back on a secret here... I hate everything french for all the basic reasons most people hate the french which are all more or less deeply rooted in their insurmountable arrogance. I've been both to the heartland of frenchianity where I spent a couple of weeks in Paris and I have seen and forever turned my back on Quebec. La monde francophone, "The Frenchspeaking World" which the "Grande Nation" is so terribly proud of is shrinking while I am typing this. It's not that they're not painfully aware of this rapidly decreasing "mind share" and the "mind share threat" posed by les Anglais, we all know what kind of vile laws they have both in La France and Quebec to preserve their oh so precious culture. Let's not help them out by referencing their culture more than is absolutely necessary minimum. As far as the programming language is concerned. One would think that a clearly superior product could be called anything at all and it would succeed no matter what. This I strongly believe is not true because I think deep down most people feel as I do. What I've heard about Eiffel is very interesting which is why I am getting involved with it. However I do have a hard time fighting down the loathing I have for the french and it really hits me extra hard when I look at the box they have on the commercial Eiffelstudio page which clearly looks like "La Tour Eiffel", the Eiffel Tower. I have karma to burn, but if you're really thinking instead of giving in to the kneejerk reaction of perceived "hate speech" then by all means mod the parent up.