Re: [GD-General] Eiffel

[Thatcher U. <tu...@tu...>]

On Dec 19, 2001 at 03:09 -0800, Brian Hook wrote:
> 
> >I'm full of opinions and theories, like everyone else I'm sure.  My
> >semi-educated impression is that OCaml is the paragon of advanced
> >features, Dylan is the modern heir to the Common Lisp heritage,
> >Haskell is hardcore functional, Eiffel is hardcore OO, and Java/C#
> >is > the half-measure we're all going to be using instead.
> 
> I'm shying away from experimental languages that don't have
> comprehensive IDEs.  I'm firmly of the belief that a solid
> development environment is PART of the language, not an add on,
> because the language is strictly a syntax, which is only part of the
> equation.

Well, there's my favorite IDE, emacs.  Supports every language you've
ever heard of, and every feature (for better or worse).  Not very fun
to learn, though.

> My productivity when writing tools with Obj-C/Cocoa is roughly 5-10x
> that of using MFC/C++.

Cool... I take it Cocoa is what used to be NextStep...

> The fundamental problem with using something like Obj-C, SmallTalk
> or Eiffel is that they're so detached from the hardware that getting
> high performance is fairly difficult.  Not only that, but things
> like memory management can't be ignored, especially issues like
> memory fragmentation.  I've heard of MUD servers that can run for
> two days then grind to a halt; not because of a leak, but because
> their address space has become so fragmented from numerous small
> allocations and deletions.

Hm, well, that kind of thing sounds like a bug in the garbage
collector, or a crummy allocator.  A practical problem, nonetheless.

> I just don't think C++'s compromising straddle
> of the no-man's land between "close to the metal" and "high level
> abstractions" makes much sense, not for large scale projects that
> typically don't NEED to get close to the metal.

Agreed; although performance does matter, *especially* for large-scale
projects.  C++ has good compilers and discourages the use of
high-level stuff; unfortunately it punishes us programmers.  In theory
OCaml should be able to make better code than C++ just about always,
but in practice I'm sure it often doesn't.

> And I just find the whole notion of text files that store lines of code
> horribly quaint.  It's the new millenium and we're still worrying about
> things like forward declarations and circular dependencies.  I find that
> amazing.

I've heard this gripe a few times lately, and I really don't see it.
What's wrong with files, really?  Isn't it really C++'s
declare-before-use that's the problem?

-- 
Thatcher Ulrich <tu...@tu...>
http://tulrich.com