Team Eiffel

Long-time Eiffel iconoclast Llothar Scholz writes in comp.lang.eiffel:

Two months after the ISE deal it seems that the people who thought "Eiffel just needs a good open source compiler" are really wrong.

Instead of seeing more newbie questions this newsgroup is more silent then ever ... So is eiffel doomed or already buried?

Several people replied, pointing out that comp.lang.eiffel may no longer be the sexiest place in town to hang out at.

In the late 80's and early 90's, comp.lang.eiffel was just about the ONLY place for Eiffelists to hang out at. An early attempt at a CompuServe forum didn't make much headway. Bertrand Meyer was an active participant on comp.lang.eiffel, and indeed many aspects of the design of Eiffel (and ISE's implementation of it) were discussed and resolved on comp.lang.eiffel.

Now, there are plenty of other places to hang out. If we just consider the YahooGroups mailing lists, we can see some of them:

• NICE-Discuss (137 subscribers)
• Eiffel Software (ISE) (871 subscribers)
• ePOSIX (71 subscribers)
• Gobo Eiffel (126 subscribers)
• Visual Eiffel (184 subscribers)

There are other more specialized Eiffel-related groups at YahooGroups too, such as the Bay Area Friends of Eiffel list. Bear in mind also that, for most of these groups, you don't need to subscribe in order to read them on the web.

There are also a bunch of Eiffel-related mailing lists at sites like SourceForge. The EiffelStudio lists at ETH Zurich must have a load of subscribers, and there's also the SmartEiffel list at loria.fr.

So, although comp.lang.eiffel may be relatively quiet nowadays, that's nothing more than a reflection of the relative unpopularity of Usenet and the continued specialization of Eiffel.