Team Eiffel

A few fairly innocent questions by Phil Taylor on the SmartEiffel mailing list led to an extraordinary amount of vitriol from main SmartEiffel contributors. In the end, one of the main SmartEiffel users outside the inner SmartEiffel circules decided to leave as well. Roger Browne, main contributor to this blog wrote:

That creates an atmosphere in which I can't contribute usefully to SmartEiffel. Bye.

Strange how the one compiler that opened up Eiffel to the open source community is led by people who have a talent and willingness to plant the boot into the face of everyone actually using their product. Very sad.

Outside the core SmartEiffel contributors we now only have Daniel F. Moisset, the guy behind the SmartEiffel Transitional release and Cyril Adrian, who wrote in the same thread:

Note that ESE will be my last attempt to do something viable with SmartEiffel. I'm quite fed up with hearing that the project is not open enough when we have been doing all we could to open up, KNOWING THAT SmartEiffel is not easily "openable" itself since it is primarily a research project (and the lab is a bit lukewarm in that respect).

Kinda vague. Greg C., another Eiffelist who has been around, wrote:

Over two hundred messages on this one lame topic?

That's it. I'm done.

Let's just hope that the Gobo Eiffel compiler will be ready soon. Although ISE Eiffel is open source, compiling a simple program with ISE Eiffel isn't simple. And although with my new laptop compilation is fast, it wasn't with my old Pentium III 650. And ISE takes up a huge amount of disk space. The story changes of course for large programs, where ISE Eiffel is a must. Recompilation speed with ISE is blindingly fast in such cases, and painful with the SmartEiffel approach.

Labels: smarteiffel