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> I don’t think Meyer understood that the era of free compilers had begun. That's right, and something I had totally forgotten. I started with a shareware ver

> I don’t think Meyer understood that the era of free compilers had begun. That's right, and something I had totally forgotten. I started with a shareware version (?) of Eiffel Studio, and later it was made free as long as you used it either for non-commercial purposes, or released your software as GPL. Looking back at it, that just sounds quaint. I think the IDE was actually written in Eiffel, and was pretty good for that time, but not good enough to stand out, like Turbo Pascal did back in the days.

deleted 7y ago
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ncmncm 7y ago
Ah, yessss, Cepage, or "seepage". At the very first talk I went to, to find out about Eiffel, in 1986, Meyer spent 3/4 of his alotted time talking about Cepage. Soured me. It was an interesting language, in some ways, and could have been extended enough to be useful but, like Modula-3 and Oberon, even at the time obviously would not supplant C++. Rust could still suffer the same fate if it can't fix its compiler-speed problems. It's the only candidate on the horizon, with its Drop trait, for those places where nothing else will do.
- pjmlp 7y ago
  Wirth has mentions in one of its articles, not sure which, that he just expected too much from mainstream. He was convinced, that by building such systems, mainstream programmers that cared about quality engineering would just flock to Modula-2 and Oberon, and in retrospect some advertising effort could have been done. Modula-3 was killed by Compaq and HP, after their cascade acquisition from Olivetti research labs, they never cared about this kind of research. Rust might have better chance, because just like it happened with C++ vs C, there are a couple of big names that care about it nowadays. Microsoft just had an internal Rust Summit. Also Ada is still around, NVidia and Genode OS being two relevant names that have recently adopted it for security critical software layers. Ada has had RAII since Ada95.

deleted 7y ago

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ncmncm 7y ago

Ah, yessss, Cepage, or "seepage". At the very first talk I went to, to find out about Eiffel, in 1986, Meyer spent 3/4 of his alotted time talking about Cepage. Soured me. It was an interesting language, in some ways, and could have been extended enough to be useful but, like Modula-3 and Oberon, even at the time obviously would not supplant C++. Rust could still suffer the same fate if it can't fix its compiler-speed problems. It's the only candidate on the horizon, with its Drop trait, for those places where nothing else will do.

pjmlp 7y ago
Wirth has mentions in one of its articles, not sure which, that he just expected too much from mainstream. He was convinced, that by building such systems, mainstream programmers that cared about quality engineering would just flock to Modula-2 and Oberon, and in retrospect some advertising effort could have been done. Modula-3 was killed by Compaq and HP, after their cascade acquisition from Olivetti research labs, they never cared about this kind of research. Rust might have better chance, because just like it happened with C++ vs C, there are a couple of big names that care about it nowadays. Microsoft just had an internal Rust Summit. Also Ada is still around, NVidia and Genode OS being two relevant names that have recently adopted it for security critical software layers. Ada has had RAII since Ada95.