A bit OT... On 15/11/2007, at 3:28 PM, Ian Joyner wrote:
Then I looked at Ruby on Rails. I have to agree with Robert that this is one elegant beast and is fun (whereas the more I look at J EE, the more I am filled with dread), but is probably not quite in the same heavy-duty league as WO/EOF (or J EE, yuk). Maybe it will take over and do the 80% of sites where you don't need anything heavy duty. I'd still say that Eiffel is a more elegant language than Ruby, although I think Ruby was somewhat influenced by Eiffel, just as C++ and Java have been in perverse ways.
I believe Ruby was influenced by Smalltalk, amongst others.
However, Eiffel is not the flavour of the month, especially on the Mac, because it is statically typed, and Objective-C people and now Ruby people like dynamic run-time typing. I can see the point, but RTT is more the exception than the norm, and can be catered to in a more static framework (just one or two language constructs are needed to tell the compiler to circumvent the check). What I find frustrating about Ruby development, is it is not compiled at all, and so you have to test by running it, even to find simple syntax errors, let alone semantic bugs.
Are you not using Eclipse for your Ruby/Rails development? I think you'll find the 'needing to run to find errors' is not quite true.
You have to think about arranging your tests so that everything gets tested, whereas in a compiled language, the compiler tests everything (especially in Eiffel where Make, compilation, and cross- module link consistency checks are done in the compiler). For that reason, I found Eiffel the best refactoring language ever. Refactoring in dynamic environments is much more dangerous.
with regards, -- Lachlan Deck _______________________________________________ Do not post admin requests to the list. They will be ignored. Webobjects-dev mailing list ([email protected]) Help/Unsubscribe/Update your Subscription: http://lists.apple.com/mailman/options/webobjects-dev/archive%40mail-archive.com This email sent to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
