[College] That's it ... they hate us ...

[dancefloorlandmine]

And, in a cunning ploy to guarantee that we don't have social lives in January or February, the first Object Oriented Programming course of next year is not only in Eiffel, which will be a completely new language to almost all of us, but will also be spread out in five weekly installments, which must be handed in week by week to receive any feedback - which, it being a new language to us, we might possibly need. Ho-hum. So, after my birthday, I might not be seen all that much until the end of February. Mutter.

Comments

[wechsler.livejournal.com]

Who the fook uses Eiffel?

[d-floorlandmine.livejournal.com]

Apparently, one of my lecturers. They claim that they want to use it so as to demonstrate some pure Object Oriented concepts that Java doesn't properly implement. Once we've done this one Eiffel-only exercise, the others can be done in Java or Eiffel - our choice. In fact, the last one can be Java, Eiffel, or C#, once they've taught us that!

[aimlessdesire.livejournal.com]

If you get the chance to do c# do it. Especially if you want a programming job, because there's so many jobs in C# these days. If you know Java it won't be that hard to learn either.

TBH it doesn't really matter what language you learn if they teach you good programming practices as those can be easily taken from one language to another. Too many people just hack at code until it works and have no idea how to do things properly. I got taught programming in Modula 2 at uni because they refused to teach us C because it was too easy to do things badly in C!

[d-floorlandmine.livejournal.com]

C# and Java are both part of the OOP course - the idea is that they're teaching us OO concepts, using those languages as examples because they're useful - roughly the same reason why we're learning SQL with Oracle ... We had C++ last year, to try to inculcate the basics of programming. Doesn't mean I'm any good at it, mind ...

[jaq.livejournal.com]

Once you've done one OO language it's not such a jump to pick up others - while there are differences in some ways of doing things, they share a lot.

[d-floorlandmine.livejournal.com]

It's not so much the new language thing (which will just confuse me with syntax), but the "one a week" approach, as we'll still be getting other coursework as well, and having to fit it in. Oh yeah, and there will be a roll-out of our new Information Database, including probably going up to Macclesfield to run the training for the staff up there.

(I want to go to Macclesfield, as I've already done Bristol, and one of the Macc staff is pleasantly off the wall ... and keeps complaining that Bristol get all the visits.)

[velvetfox.livejournal.com]

Comiserationd (sp?) from a fellow scholar :(

[d-floorlandmine.livejournal.com]

Commiserating [hugs]. Right, now back to that last SQL question, and then I can go home, and leave the Java for tomorrow ...

[blue-condition.livejournal.com]

From what I recall there are some interesting near-bugs in the Eiffel type system - there are nasty tricks you can play with covariance that mean the compiler has to do painful global checks over the whole program. In pathological cases you can bog the machine down for a long time just trying to work out whether what you've said is legal or not.

But I haven't even looked at Eiffel for about 15 years, God knows what the details were. All I know is that once someone starts burbling on about covariance and contravariance of types my eyes glaze over.

[valkyriekaren.livejournal.com]

They're obviously all bastards.

I've never even heard of Eiffel. Aside from the French architecture thing, y'know.

[cookwitch.livejournal.com]

I think I have to second - and possibly thirs - that sentiment. Do they not know what they are doing to your friends, depriving us of you like this?

*grins*

[cookwitch.livejournal.com]

That would, of course, have said 'third'.

*sigh*

[mooism.livejournal.com]

Eiffel tries to build certain “good practices” into the language. It makes you think about things that other languages don’t make as explicit, when perhaps they should.

I wouldn’t want to program in Eiffel day-to-day. Though I don’t want to program in Java day-to-day, either, but I must *sigh*

[wag-9393.livejournal.com]

Ah Eiffel. Great for theory etc, never seem it used in major commerical anger. Sometimes a language can go too far down the "exactly to the theory" book, I don't like Smalltalk for the same reason although it did get a bigger following than fecking Eiffel. Funny thing, I've just been boxing up books for storage and came across a wonderful little book I have on Abstract data types, I studied that alongside Eiffel about 10 years ago.

God doesn't time fly.

[d-floorlandmine.livejournal.com]

[grin] There was a suggestion that there may have been some interpersonal differences which led to a certain lack of enthusiastic uptake. I think in this case it is just being used to illustrate the theory which the other languages bodge about a bit.

[d-floorlandmine.livejournal.com]

I can't comment on that (yet), but it would appear from wag_9393's comment above that it does tend to be viewed as a theoretical language ...