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.
Capacities of internet bandwith now are limited not by last mile users, but by the bandwith between nodes that are in place between users and the servers. And it is a lot more expencive to fix, than to give home access to fiber optics.
I think people who made this creature were thinking along these lines: Let's make a distro that so few people use, that no hacker in conscious mind would even attempt to break into system that is running it.
Seriously, what makes this distro different from, let's say, properly configured debian without X?
First half of the article explains why not to use bittorent the argument goes like this: You can get in jail! You can download nasty stuff! oh and by the way, you can legally download some crap sometimes(I'm not implying linux). Finally, when you get to the actual review you just want to run away as soon as possible.
And why BitSpirit wasn't reviewed, it's a popular BT client?
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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.
Suddenly, I feel urge to take a laptop, go to public places and read there slashdot.
OMG!!! SLASHDOT RULE$$!!!
Really? Have you ever tried video conferencing on a regular basis.
Capacities of internet bandwith now are limited not by last mile users, but by the bandwith between nodes that are in place between users and the servers. And it is a lot more expencive to fix, than to give home access to fiber optics.
I think people who made this creature were thinking along these lines: Let's make a distro that so few people use, that no hacker in conscious mind would even attempt to break into system that is running it. Seriously, what makes this distro different from, let's say, properly configured debian without X?
First half of the article explains why not to use bittorent the argument goes like this: You can get in jail! You can download nasty stuff! oh and by the way, you can legally download some crap sometimes(I'm not implying linux). Finally, when you get to the actual review you just want to run away as soon as possible.
And why BitSpirit wasn't reviewed, it's a popular BT client?