Comment by haxeny1 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by haxeny1 | Hacker News Reader

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I never understood the following : Eiffel had a better syntax, better support for core issues, Void type, design by contract, multiple-inheritance and an intermediate virtual machine for portability although the most common target was C code. To name a few. I was using Eiffel in a small side project just about when Java released their 1.1.4 (a version before the object serialization library, iirc). It was a sticking point for me. Add to that, to program in java before IBM Visual Age was released was to using vi/notepad(++?) editors. Coming from Smalltalk env that was a bit of a shock. Eiffel commercial IDE from ISE was way better and its clever use of pick event on the mouse's right click to drop to compile/run targets was actually easier on my fingers, which is a side show, but good quality products demonstrate quality at unexpected places.

I am still programming in java in my day job, knowing fully well that Java was not my top five language choices. Eiffel's type system was a bit more advanced than Java even way back in those days, so not only was I stuck without an ide till VA for Java showed up or VisuallJ++ I also had to accept weak inheritance and design by contract models. Performance of course was not even close to an Eiffel compiled C code, which was probably addressed in later versions of java.

My point being, that just as Eiffel was something that was better and set aside by a few leading development shops, there must have been other languages that could/should have received a fair share in language evaluation by programmers, I dont necessarily mean limiting to Ruby, Python for example, despite them being excellent tools, they may fall short in an enterprise ecosystem. What happened at least I seem to think instead is a sort of groupthink to start coding in Java because of rubbernecking. All in all, I think that things could have been better if people paused to understand the Java language model and fixed in java 1.2/3, or some earlier version so we didnt have to wait till Java 1.8 to get these features. /rant.

I developed a great interest in Eiffel after I read Bertrand Meyer's book "Object Oriented Software Construction" (which I still think is one of the all time great books on object-oriented programming), but I never found anyone else that was using it and the IDE was way too expensive for me at the time. It just seemed to me like one of those technologies you'd probably get to have fun with on some niche project at a defense contractor, but that you'd probably never see out in the more general software development world.

I was one of those folks who actually bought the personal license. Over years, SmallEiffel came along and improved the ecosystem. Of course, now Eiffel has a community/enterprise model. In any event, I do think that they were pricing them out of the market. Defense contractors, seem to like ada more. The feature that I miss from Eiffel is the Expanded (allocated on stack feature). Even haskell has some #untyped to deal with boxing primitives. I thought that Expanded was a stroke of genius: bringing specification to implementation without the middleman(aka heap).

I agree with you.

Before Java was known to the world, I already knew plenty of languages with closures, value types, GC,AOT compilation to native code, ...

But they all suffered from two problems, not being from known companies with geek credit and being commercial.

Java was from Sun (geek credit) and was free (as in beer), hence why it got adopted.

I think it would been great if Eiffel had got a decent market share,instead of just the DBC ideas.

But if I remember correctly they went after the enterprise, so the language was out of reach to many developers given what they used to charge for.

Syntax is not a big deal. Ideally it should be small. If you don't like java, please don't use it. move on. Why create ugliness in java?

Typesystem is not the same as syntax? I dont believe raising ugliness in syntax as an issue. Of course, I do mention the ugliness in Haskell and that is in special cases where the overhead of boxing is significant. So, yeah, we could move on, but I think that is a specious argument. I guess one could really move on, till we start seeing Scala embrace Uniform Access Principle or Java embrace lambdas (implicitly or explicitly) to support generics. So, what it seems to me is that you are ok with a bad language design and accept the weakness of the language because it was delivered and also accept that like any working document there could be amendments and that is part of working in a programming language. Moreover, the principles of language design that I list were available as prior art, so it is not clear as to why Java language designers decided to at least not refer to it during design. Anyway, my intention was not to start a flame war? Note: Regarding : "why create ugliness in Java?" Any reason for an ad homenim attack? or was it a general rant? Since we are on hacker news I would like to give you the benefit of doubt :).

I don't remember the detail at the time but I think the lack of free tools hurt Eiffel's wider adoption.

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