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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."
As a language, Eiffel doesn't make it more convenient to express a problem to receive a good solution, it just makes the programmer follow the public speaker's maxim:
Programming by contract is essentially just writing twice as many unit tests, wrapped all around the code that is supposed to be doing the work. It's even easier to write bad tests when it's right next to the code being tested, so why bother?
Bertie, give it up already!
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When choosing the right tool for the job, you choose the tool that can meet a balance of three particular things.
1) Best tool for producing the application
2) The tool you can find people that know how to use
3) The tool with the best support
Well, there are tons of places that Eiffel is the best tool for the job. I would even imagine that there are circumstances where the support is there. Problem is finding the people that know how to use it.
I've been goofing with Eiffel ocassionally, but time and time again, it proves the wrong tool for the job. It's just too different from other languages to be able to meet my needs. I always fall back onto C++ with a widget toolkit (such as Qt). It is definately not because C++ is a better language. It is definately not that Qt is the ultimate widget toolkit. It is because there is a good balance of all 3 criteria being met.
I am 100% in favor of companies trying to sell us a new language, but what it really boils down to is that only a handful of people will use it and other than an ocassional interest article, this is probably the big hay day for the language since there is a open source news worthy article written about it.
Another great example of a language that is probably better but has never picked up steam is Scheme. Every compiler developer in the world loves scheme. It is by far the most heavily optimized compiled language on the planet. It has great merits. But the fact is that with the exception of the scheme compilers written in scheme and an ocassional university project, the language stalled years ago.
The parent comment to yours was sarcasm... it may have been misinformed as you comment, but the fact is that he is right in his sarcasm.
"I am 100% in favor of companies trying to sell us a new language...", but since Eiffel dates back to 1985-86, I don't know what you mean.
"Another great example of a language that is probably better but has never picked up steam is Scheme. Every compiler developer in the world loves scheme. It is by far the most heavily optimized compiled language on the planet. It has great merits. But the fact is that with the exception of the scheme compilers written in scheme and and an ocassional university project", which is what it was designed for: Scheme was meant to be simple rather than useful, in order to further the study of such things as program correctness (software algorthims studied as mathematics) by academia. The industrial version is Common Lisp.
When discussing the right tool for the job, comments regarding the attempt to use a thermometer as a hammer (Scheme vs Common Lisp) make it hard to take your C++ vs Eiffel seriously, especially since you seem to think a 21 year old language is "new". It is old enough to drink.