From: Friedrich Dominicus Date: 2004-08-11T01:41:15+09:00 Subject: Re: Eiffel "Fitzgerald,Greg" writes: > ------_=_NextPart_001_01C47EF1.CE1F4ACA > Content-Type: text/plain; > charset="us-ascii" > Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable > > > What do you guys think of the Eiffel language? I use Ruby for all my > personal projects, but when it comes to building huge (multi-million > line) systems, I look to the safety of statically-typed languages. I would appriciate not to start a discussin about that again. One does not need those languages even for large systems.... It might help sometimes it might hinder to other times. > I've > grown very tired of the deficiencies in C++ and am now hunting out a > better language to build highly-reliable code. I suppose Java would be > okay but everything about that platform seems boring and bloated. > Eiffel looks very impressive and seems to have many of the same language > abilities as Ruby. Not to mention, Design by Contract looks pretty > useful. Has anyone used Eiffel? Yes now for around 12 years. It's the language I know best. We even have dared to write a descendant to Eiffel called Q, it has reached alpha status. We used Eiffel to develop that language... > Success stories? AFAIK is it used relativly widley in the banking sector (London IIRC). >Crash & Burn > stories? > It doesn't look like the language has changed much in the last > 6 years. Oh, it has changed. Some syntactical elements have changed forth and back but the core is still the same. Relativly new is the concept of agents what you can see as kind-of-blocks. That was very much missed, at least for me, and I have posted this opinion more than once ... > Is that because the language is about dead or because it is > that stable? The language is alive. You get all kind of tools for Eiffel-development but at least the "serious" offers have a hefty price tag (that's all what comes from ISE), but you can get SmartEiffel which is free... However you might like to hear that an Eiffel.NET is available..... If you ever should consider starting an Eifel project, feel free to contact me ;-) However you might get better answers in comp.lang.eiffel. Ruby has "borrowed" quite a bit from Eiffel... so if you like and know Ruby it is not terrible hard to start with Eiffel.... Regards Friedrich -- Please remove just-for-news- to reply via e-mail.