Team Eiffel

This is from the Eiffel Software list at YahooGroups:

Bruce Mount wrote:

...sigh...I'm sure this is easy, but Ive spent a lot of time on this and I have not figured it out yet. How do you search in a BINARY_SEARCH_TREE?

Emmanuel Stapf replied:

There is no query to give you the item you looked for. For the moment, you may need to extend BINARY_SEARCH_TREE to add this feature.

It's always good to get the definitive answer from Manu - but this time I don't know whether to laugh or cry...

As I'm doing a lot of PHP at the moment, I'm following PHP news with interest. But 7 reasons I switched back to PHP after 2 years on Rails is interesting for Eiffel programmers as well. For example:

I was nearly killing my company in the name of blindly insisting Rails was the answer to all questions, timeframes be damned.
But when I took a real emotionless non-prejudiced look at it, I realized the language didn’t matter that much.
Ruby is prettier. Rails has nice shortcuts. But no big shortcuts I can’t code-up myself in a day if needed.

Update, one more observation I couldn't agree with more:

Speaking of tastes: tiny but important thing : I love SQL. I dream in queries. I think in tables.
I was always fighting against Rails and its migrations hiding my beloved SQL from me.

Although I prefer Xplain, the issue is the same. All that active record, hiding the database, somehow making it object oriented, is a complete waste of energy. Databases and objects are two different worlds. Storing objects is possible and can be abstracted nicely. Then try to do fast searching, combining data, data warehousing, and that nice little object oriented world falls apart.