> We tried to take over the framework by ourselves but it was written in Eiffel and the code was a horrible entangled mess. Eventually we rewrote it in Java but

> We tried to take over the framework by ourselves but it was written in Eiffel and the code was a horrible entangled mess. Eventually we rewrote it in Java but, being a start-up, we lost too much precious time already I wonder, would the result be different if you had access to competent Eiffel developers? How large was the Eiffel codebase? Eiffel is an interesting language, with a somewhat unique feature-set (I think only Ada is coming close). Design by contract and static typing as core language features - if used right - should greatly help with both stability and ease of refactoring. How large the codebase was is an important question, also how bad it really was. I saw a similar story - external codebase getting worse and worse from some point on - with Clojure at the center. The code quality was quite ok for a couple of months, then it worsened. At that point and for a couple of following months the codebase was possible to save - a single competent Clojure programmer would make a difference, I think. The project was less than 10k LOC then. However, more than 1.5 years and 60k LOC later, doing anything became nearly impossible for anyone, including original authors.