Language of the week
January 3rd, 2006 at 12:21 am
Eiffel and the SmartEiffel compiler.
Pro: design-by-contract is a very powerful programming methodology and is especially appealing if you have a theoretical background.
Pro: the Eiffel type system has “not kidding around” written all over it.
Con: a standard library that doesn’t have everything and the kitchen sink feels incomplete when you’re used to Java.
Con: compilation via translation to C means you can get errors like
main1.c: In function '_T112C112l147c27':
main1.c:5096: error: '_basic' undeclared (first use in this function)
when the compiler has a bug (and you do, too).
Discuss.
maxg
Both comments and trackbacks are closed.
Try OCaml. One of my cow-erkers swears by it. And its type-checking system is definitely “not kidding around.” Nor are the compilers borked. You can also compile it to native code, so it runs pretty damn fast.
As for myself, I’m into “heavy wizardry and/or pain” (as the Perl book puts it), so I deal in C and C++ :).
Mike Z. | January 3rd, 2006 at 07:45 pm
OCaml is indeed a great language, also very appealing to the theory-minded.
And learn to spell ‘cow-orkers.’ Wikipedia (the encyclopedia anyone can edit as long as he wasn’t born fewer than four days ago, but where many of the articles read like they were written by someone who was born yesterday and learned grammar the day before) lists ‘cow-irkers’ as a possibly meritorious alternative, but ‘erkers’ is right out.
maxg | January 4th, 2006 at 10:29 am