Eppur si sugat

[Hrvoje Nezic]

>  It's not about OO software construction. It's more
> 
>  "generally good design principles" + how to code things in Eiffel.

This is simply not true. OOSC2 is not a book about Eiffel.
Meyer's book is about software construction, from his 
own point of view, of course.

Most books about programming languages just describe 
syntax and semantics of a given language. Meyer's book
is very different and almost unique: he discusses various 
possibilities, dillemas, why some features had to be rejected,
etc.

And this is a fine book, and Eiffel is a very fine language
("arguably the best object-oriented language"). 
Of course, if O-O is considered bad by definition, 
this means nothing. 

For me, O-O (especially in elegant and well-designed 
languages, like Eiffel) means big progress from C and alike, 
freedom from having allocating memory by hand, 
dealing with pointers etc, etc. 
In this way Eiffel is light years ahead of C.

I am open minded, I love to learn new things and explore
new possibilities. That is why I am on this list.
I like at least some aspects of Erlang (especially
processes).

However, stating that some other paradigms,
like O-O, are completely wrong, is too much
in my opinion.

>   The fact  the "OO"  word is on  the cover  and the word  "eiffel" is
> absent from the cover notes is probably to sell more titles.

This is not a fair statement and not a right way to criticize "ideological
enemy", like Meyer. Meyer's book is about object oriented
programming. He obviously had to include some program examples
in the book. What were his options? To use pseudo-code?
To use C++? Simula? Smalltalk? Java (nonexisting when
he wrote the first edition)? Eiffel was invented because there
were no other suitable O-O language. So, he obviously used
Eiffel, not only because he invented it, but because it is
in many ways superior to alternatives.

By the way, OOSC-2 is not the only Meyer's book.
His book about Eiffel is called "Eiffel the Language".
If OOSC-2 was book about Eiffel, why he wrote ETL? 
Of course, you can say that he wrote it to make more 
money, but again, I think this would not correspond to
facts.

Regards,
Hrvoje Nezic