RE: [GD-General] Eiffel

[Brian H. <bri...@py...>]

> But I've jumped on the flavor-of-the-month before (Icon, 
> Smalltalk...got into C++ in 1988, which was at least 5 years 
> too early, maybe 10...got into Java in 1995, which was again 
> too early...) and now I'm wary of language and development 
> platforms that don't have enough general interest to sustain 
> a business. I might even go back and look at Smalltalk again 
> -- there are some grownup versions of it around now.

I think Eiffel is fairly mature -- there are multiple free and
commercial compilers and environments for it.  That was what made me
more interested -- I managed to avoid C++ in the CFront days, but
somehow managed to get sucked in with Borland's first offering.

However, I'm finding that Eiffel does, in fact, have a couple warts.
The biggest is that there is no single implementation that has the
entire language implemented.  Sound familiar? =) However, this seems to
be a temporary problem and can be worked around.  Hopefully it
stabilizes relatively soon.

The other big problem is that there's no STL that is part of the spec.
Each vendor implements their own container class libraries.  However,
there is an open-source STL-like library called GOBO that is portable
among all the variants out today.  Amusingly enough, to accomplish this
they required a preprocessor, gepp, that supports #if, #define, #undef,
etc.  So much for "get rid fo the preprocessor".

> Whoever made the comment about "it's a poor workman who 
> blames his tools" -- there's a HUGE difference between 
> blaming your tools for poor results and wanting sharper 
> tools.

Well said.

> question to me has always been whether that productivity on 
> an individual workstation can translate effectively into 
> productivity for delivery of a shippable consumer product.

I think so.  My Cocoa/Obj-C experience, which I've harped upon now a
zillion times, was an eye opener for how much better the process can be.
And that was mostly by leveraging slightly better tools (IB), frameworks
(Cocoa) and a language (Obj-C) -- ProjectBuilder isn't that good an IDE.
 
> And just to get in my shot...to me, using emacs is like 
> asking for a car and being told "here's a pickup truck full 
> of spare parts -- if it doesn't meet your needs, you can take 
> it apart and rebuild it all by yourself!" I don't have time 
> for that much freedom.

Oh crap, now you've done it.

Brian "Curse you freedom, CURSE YOU!" Hook