Why I chose D over Ada and Eiffel

[Peter Williams]

On 20/08/13 06:18, Ramon wrote:
> Falling over the famous Ariane 5 article I looked at Eiffel. I have to
> confess that I almost feel in love. Eiffel felt just right and Prof.
> Meyers books convinced me again and again - Yesss, that's the way I'd
> like to work and develop software.
> Unfortunately, though, Prof Meyer and ISE (the Eiffel company) made some
> errors, too, and in a major way.
> For a starter that whole Eiffel world is pretty much a large beautiful
> castle ... inmidst a desert. Theoretically there are different
> compilers, factually, however, ISE's Eiffelstudio is the only one; the
> others are either brutally outdated or non-conforming or weird niche
> thingies or eternally in alpha, or a mixture of those. And Eiffelstudio
> costs north of 5.000 us$. Sure there is a GPL version but that is
> available only for GPL'ed programs.
> Next issue: Eiffels documentation is plain lousy. Yes, there are some 5
> or so books but those are either purely theoretical or very outdated or
> both. Yes there is lots of documentation online but most of it basically
> is luring sales driven "Look how easy it is with Eiffel" stuff. And
> there is a doxygen like API doc which is pretty worthless for learning
> how to practically use the language.
> Furthermore, while Eiffel comes with a lot on board there still is much
> missing; just as an example there are no SSL sockets which nowadays is a
> killer.

I found similar issues with Eiffel plus I was turned off by the OOP only 
factor.  Programming needs to be more flexible than that.

BTW using Eiffel was where I first realized that contracts would never 
be as useful as I hoped.  They're still useful and I still use them but 
they're not as expressive as I'd hoped for (neither are D's).  In 
reality, they're just highly targeted unit tests.  I think my 
disappointment stems from the fact I used to write Z specifications and 
I would liked to have contracts that were the equivalent.

Peter