Tuesday, May 15, 2007
Eiffel and Bertrand Meyer win the ACM Software System Award
ECMA press release:
Ecma is proud to announce that Dr. Bertrand Meyer is this year’s recipient of the ACM Software Systems Award, one of the most prestigious awards in computer science, for his design of the Eiffel programming language and environment. Dr. Bertrand Meyer is one of the few European scientists to receive this honour.
posted by Berend de Boer @ 23:34 0 comments
Thursday, May 10, 2007
The Ultimate Eiffel application
A wonderful Eiffel application would be a browser written in Eiffel. I have to restart FireFox at least once a day, it just becomes slower and slower, and consumes more and more memory, and starts to behave erratically at last.
I would be a huge job. You want Firebug of course, JavaScript, CSS, SVG. But if it would be written in ISE Eiffel you can also take advantages of its excellent moving garbage collection.
A super stable browser, what a thought.
Any people with money should contact my by email.
I would be a huge job. You want Firebug of course, JavaScript, CSS, SVG. But if it would be written in ISE Eiffel you can also take advantages of its excellent moving garbage collection.
A super stable browser, what a thought.
Any people with money should contact my by email.
posted by Berend de Boer @ 20:39 1 comments
Tuesday, May 08, 2007
Advocating Eiffel at the Regional Free Software Conference
The Regional Free Software Conference is one of the largest Free Software events in Latin America. The 6th and most recent one, in October 2006, was organized at Mendoza, Argentina.
Last year I decided to take there a presentation about Eiffel, oriented to developers who never heard about it, saying mostly "Hey, there is a language you don't know called Eiffel, you can use it, it's cool!". My presentation is available (OpenDocument slides/Powerpoint slides, converted; both are in spanish) are available under a creative commons by-nc-sa license. If you know about Eiffel you will probably understand most of the slides, even if you don't speak spanish. The strong side I perhaps noted most was that Eiffel allows you to have high-level development and efficiency at the same time. They're not the points I like most, but I thought those could get the attention from the public in a 45' talk.
The reaction from the public was interesting. Most questions were about availability of toolkits/libraries (RDBMS, GUI) than for the language itself. Even after years of having these kind of conversations, I still get surprised about how little people care about a language for itself, and how language and library are so hard to split apart. I got the attention for a few people, anyway, more advanced developers mainly: some guys from the python crowd (the python community here is quite large) and a couple of C++ guys that were really hooked (one of them a contributor of Boost).
Still, it's hard to prepare a talk advocating Eiffel for the masses. I want to retry again this year, at the 7th conference; but would like to look for better ways to "sell" Eiffel. So, if any of you had good ideas about what kind of stuff would be nice to present at an "Introducing Eiffel" talk, you will earn a place at my "Thanks!" slide. Thanks! (in advance).
Last year I decided to take there a presentation about Eiffel, oriented to developers who never heard about it, saying mostly "Hey, there is a language you don't know called Eiffel, you can use it, it's cool!". My presentation is available (OpenDocument slides/Powerpoint slides, converted; both are in spanish) are available under a creative commons by-nc-sa license. If you know about Eiffel you will probably understand most of the slides, even if you don't speak spanish. The strong side I perhaps noted most was that Eiffel allows you to have high-level development and efficiency at the same time. They're not the points I like most, but I thought those could get the attention from the public in a 45' talk.
The reaction from the public was interesting. Most questions were about availability of toolkits/libraries (RDBMS, GUI) than for the language itself. Even after years of having these kind of conversations, I still get surprised about how little people care about a language for itself, and how language and library are so hard to split apart. I got the attention for a few people, anyway, more advanced developers mainly: some guys from the python crowd (the python community here is quite large) and a couple of C++ guys that were really hooked (one of them a contributor of Boost).
Still, it's hard to prepare a talk advocating Eiffel for the masses. I want to retry again this year, at the 7th conference; but would like to look for better ways to "sell" Eiffel. So, if any of you had good ideas about what kind of stuff would be nice to present at an "Introducing Eiffel" talk, you will earn a place at my "Thanks!" slide. Thanks! (in advance).
Labels: advocacy, conference, eiffel, talk
posted by Daniel F Moisset @ 02:35 2 comments
