Experience learning Eiffel

• 2 min read

Well Eiffel Programming  besides being a almost dead language, or just very not popular or lucky in being use for many people. Either way it is always good to take advantages to learn new languages (“programming of course”).  Since now I have the chance to add this experience into my career to learn and build complex system using Eiffel such artificial intelligence, network sockets, GUI and network connection via sockets. I mean those are hard task but since Eiffel is quiet not so popular that makes it even harder to develop for it. So if you want to experiment with it there is some points that it is worth take into consideration before going the path:

  1. I love stack overflow. I totally believe in their concept. but when it comes to Eiffel in stack overflow there is no much help. 34 questions in total, and most of them has reply from the same person. so i guess there is not much help there.
  2. Php documentation and even python documentations are really good when it comes to help, guide or give a small example about how/which way to go to develop, extend or use some class, method in the language, but eiffel docs are just bad.
  3. Well to be fare, this guys in Zurich does really help when there is some bugs in Eiffel Studio so that it is actually nice.
  4. It was not working in Mac computers until the 12.10.2013 so that it is actually quiet bad. but according the the bugs report was thanks to another bug in  XQuartz. But now it does works.
  5. Well it does work. but some small are quiet annoying when it comes save, copy, paste strings.. Mac works CMD + command but Eiffel studio doesn't like that or don't react to it and treat the keyboard as it was windows. so it has to be CTR + command, is okay. but after some time it is ANNOYING
Well the syntax after some times you get use to it. so there is picky in that, plus it is a quiet clean language. so clean that it is not aloud by the compiler to have same file/class names even if they are not in the same folder, if they are in different directories and are named the same it will trow back an error, not cool the first time but if you think about it, is kinda cool that it does force you to write better names for the classes in the system..

So actually so far (2 weeks into) my experience learning eiffel it has been quiet good.. it does actually worth the time to learn it, not because it will open doors because it will  look like a great thing to know it, but because it is so old that actually can be related to most modern programming languages.

Programming