> I don’t think Meyer understood that the era of free compilers had begun. It arguably hadn't. OOSC came out in '88, and that was probably the first big push o

> I don’t think Meyer understood that the era of free compilers had begun. It arguably hadn't. OOSC came out in '88, and that was probably the first big push of Eiffel. The dedicated book and the release of their IDE "EiffelBench" followed in '90. Free compilers weren't an issue for either commercial nor desktop customers. But the market for the big OO language was still more open, so they would've needed to gain more ground in that era. Most of the other OO gurus of that time (and it was a fiercely personality-driven industry) favored either SmallTalk or C++. A few built other OO languages, like Oberon or Modula-3. Maybe Meyer should've collaborated/marketed more, maybe having an European background was a big downside from the very start. Maybe the whole purism was a bit too strong for an industry that likes sequels more than Hollywood does. By the time OOSC2 came out in '97, MS heavily invested in C++ and Java was all the rage. If you wanted something alternate, you used something like Delphi. It was over by then. Small/Smart-Eiffel actually was pretty good and could've been used for even commercial projects. But no programmer used it in their day job, no killer app was written in it.