Re: Eiffel and Java

[Ranjan Bagchi <ranjan.bagchi@pobox.com>]

Chris wrote:
> 
> The point with Java is that it's nearly C++.
> 
> So, even if it's not the best language, the C++ community would choose it
> 
> That's enough to make it a standard !
> 
> Chris

Note:  Smalltalk bias.

I'd think that this kind standard would tend to produce a lot of Java 
code which is just "C++ written in Java".  That is C++ code with 
whatever syntactic tweaking is needed to get it pass the compiler.  

This is similar to what has happened in the C++ community where the joke 
was that there were only 5 real C++ programmers and everyone else was 
just coding C.  There wasn't enough incentive to use the kind of C++ 
idioms that Coplien and Myers write about in their books.

That's what's really neat about languages like Smalltalk where
the language forces programmers to start thinking in Smalltalk's object 
model and produce Smalltalk written in Smalltalk.

-rj