[rcurry]

I developed a great interest in Eiffel after I read Bertrand Meyer's book "Object Oriented Software Construction" (which I still think is one of the all time great books on object-oriented programming), but I never found anyone else that was using it and the IDE was way too expensive for me at the time. It just seemed to me like one of those technologies you'd probably get to have fun with on some niche project at a defense contractor, but that you'd probably never see out in the more general software development world.

[haxeny1]

I was one of those folks who actually bought the personal license. Over years, SmallEiffel came along and improved the ecosystem. Of course, now Eiffel has a community/enterprise model. In any event, I do think that they were pricing them out of the market. Defense contractors, seem to like ada more. The feature that I miss from Eiffel is the Expanded (allocated on stack feature). Even haskell has some #untyped to deal with boxing primitives. I thought that Expanded was a stroke of genius: bringing specification to implementation without the middleman(aka heap).