EiffelStudio O-O Programming Suite for Mac OS X

name_already_in_use writes "Eiffel Software released their object-oriented programming environment for Mac OS X. It is a powerful language offering all the usual O-O wonders as well as few unique features of it's own (Design by Contract, generics). All compiled code can be run on multiple platforms including Windows, Linux, Solaris, and of course now Mac OS X, so there's no need to re-write code for different architectures."

Eiffel is not bad, but...

[coolmacdude]

They shot themselves in the foot with licensing. The Eiffel model and syntax is actually much more logical (and some would say better) than C and Java. But they made their compiler and dev kit obscenely expensive, while the others were free. I just don't see them ever recovering from that. C/Java type syntax has become the standard and switching to something completely different would be difficult.

Re:Safari.

[roskakori]

If they didn't even test their website with the most common Mac browser, then I wonder how well QA-ed their Mac port is.

eiffel uses "design by contract", which is a very powerful concept to avoid bugs or at least find them quickly at runtime. my impression always has been that because of this, eiffel developers hardly perform any additional quality assurance measures.

one of the stories that destroyed eiffel's reputation for years (decades?) was how very early compilers treated hello world: it compiled for minutes, produced an executable that was 2MB of size and crahsed when executed. now, this has long been fixed, but people keep telling it over and over.

it almost reminds me of those computer science lectures where one proves that a program is correct, and then walks home without ever implementing and executing it.