Getting to the Core of It - Julie Snyder / Monica Alford (Mon 01 May 2017)

Eiffel - Docklands / Melbourne (Wed 03 May 2017)

Julie Snyder on Getting to the Core of It :

[what] has been very helpful to always keep in mind when approaching any story is that for the most part, people always have a reason for doing what they’re doing, even if it’s one that they can’t necessarily articulate – sometimes it’s even subconscious.

There are reasons to not jump to conclusions and not assume intentions, but instead to really pursue what those reasons are and what the mindset is behind them. I think that has really yielded for us sometimes the most interesting and emotional and meaningful stories. I think it makes the story better.

via Binge-Worthy Podcasts: "Serial" and "S-Town's" Julie Snyder by Monica Alford.

Eiffel History: Eiffel Liberty Journal (eljeiffel)

Bertrand and Geoff - ETH / Zurich (Thu 25 Sep 2014)

Eiffel History: Eiffel Liberty Journal (Feb 2006) at TeamEiffel

One of Eiffel's most prolific activists from the mid-90s to 2002 was Geoff Eldridge from Australia. He spent most of his spare time hanging out in places like comp.lang.eiffel spreading information to help people to use Eiffel.

After the demise of Eiffel Outlook magazine, Geoff decided that the Eiffel community still needed a magazine, but that it should be online instead of paper-based. With that in mind, he talked a dozen or so Eiffel notables into writing articles for the first issue, and he soon published it on a website at the University of Technology, Sydney.

The magazine was named "Eiffel Liberty", inspired by the fact that Gustav Eiffel had designed the framework for both the Eiffel Tower and the Statue of Liberty. The word Liberty also reflected that Geoff had visions of helping to "set Eiffel free" from the chains that were restraining it.

The first couple of issues of Eiffel Liberty were very popular, and Geoff moved them across to his newly-registered domain elj.com where he continued to publish a new issue every two months or so.

The increased webspace, and availability of scripting tools, allowed Geoff to expand the scope of the site considerably, and soon Eiffel Liberty was hosting a huge amount of content besides Eiffel Liberty Journal. Geoff's interest in Object Technology featured strongly, and as a result the site gained widespread readership beyond the Eiffel community.

As Geoff's interests broadened, he also covered scripting languages, methodology, functional programming, extreme programming, software quality and componentry. Geoff also latched on to the burgeoning interest in open source software and featured it strongly.

Despite these broadening interests, Geoff kept up the Eiffel content. He maintained GUERL, Geoff's Eiffel Resource Locator which had links to every possible resource useful to practitioners of Eiffel. In time, this overflowed into the OO Soapbox where links to other languages and technologies were featured.

As if this wasn't enough, Geoff also introduced ELJ Daily, a regular posting of the latest snippets relating to Eiffel and Object Technology. Today we'd call this a blog, but the word hadn't been invented yet. Indeed, Geoff was one of the world's first bloggers.

All this time too, Geoff was also writing open source Eiffel software and inspiring others to do the same. Talk about a powerhouse! He was also having to pay a sizeable chunk of his own cash for hosting costs and bandwidth. He never carried ads on the site.

As the site grew, Geoff and others referred to it good-naturedly by a number of alternative acronyms, including Extremely Large Jumble, which it had certainly become. It was a very useful and much-appreciated jumble nonetheless. The nickname caught on, and soon the homepage itself carried the new slogan.

But all was not well. Geoff felt that he wasn't getting much support from the Object community. He contrasted this with his other interest, photography, where he found the online communities to be highly engaging and supportive. His massive workload might have been getting him down too, and it wouldn't have helped that his girlfriend Jenny (later his wife) had cancer.

A major blow came in late 2000 after some people had strongly criticized the GUERL page as being full of disorganized rubbish. Geoff took this to heart, and erased the page, announcing that "This page has been retired ... I suppose no impression is much better than a bad impression". Many pleaded with him to restore the page, but it was not to be.

In a way, that was the beginning of the end. Although Geoff plugged away for a few more years, the zest was never there quite like it had been before, and Geoff was devoting more time to the newly-emerging hobby of digital photography. On 24 September 2002 Geoff took down the whole of elj.com.

No-one in the Eiffel community seems to know what Geoff is up to now - and quite a few of us have tried to track him down. The elj.com home page is still live, though it contains nothing more than an invitation to click through to Cetus Links. (Does Geoff realise that a three-character domain name can be sold for quite a lot these days?)

Geoff, if you're out there, why not post a comment and let us know what you're up to?

THanks for Roger Browne who wrote this. It brings back a lot of memories.

When it Works - Christopher Nolan / Andrew Purcell / Spectrum (Sat 08 Nov 2014)

Crossing the Garonne - Toulouse (*) / France (Sat 19 Sep 2009)
Christopher Nolan (*) writes Inspiration (*):

when something works the way you intended it to, just in that moment it's a tremendous thrill.

via Interview: Christopher Nolan (*) by Andrew Purcell (*).

Yes. We all know that feeling. It happens when that program compiles and runs the first time, and works exactly as you intended. That's a rarity, but it happened a lot when I was using Eiffel (*). It happens in sport. It happens with photography, though sometimes you don't know it worked until years later.

Always get a nice quote out of the Interview from the Saturdays Paper Spectrum Magazine (*).

The Archive: A Legacy for the Future - Shooting Wide Open (Tue 21 Oct 2014)

Street Art (*) - Chippendale (Tue 15 Apr 2014)
Jin (*) writes on the Archive (*):

It comforts me a bit that even if nobody pays attention to my work [..] during my lifetime, there might be a place for it in an archive. It is a humble end, but I find the prospect of being stored for future sifting by researchers or scholars immensely appealing.

via On archives (*) by Shooting Wide Open (*).

I suppose this blog (*) will be my archive, my legacy, if there was to be a legacy, along with a beautiful old house (*), just maybe. And of course there is archive.org (*) - elj-daily (*) and GUERL (*). Amazing looking back at all of this just now. I've forgotten so much. What I do remember is how exciting it was to be connecting to people from all over the world. These were the early days of the World Wide Web and somehow I was part of it.

Eiffel Tower #1 - Paris (Tue 16 Sep 2014)

Eiffel Tower #1 - Paris (Tue 16 Sep 2014)

The seven sins of a specifier - Bertrand Meyer / IEEE SOFTWARE (Jan 1985)

On Formalism in Specifications (*)
Bertrand Meyer (*), University Of California, Santa Barbara
IEEE SOFTWARE, January 1985
The seven sins of a specifier:

• Noise: The presence in the text of an element that does not carry information relevant to any feature of the problem. Variants: redundancy; remorse.


• Silence: The existence of a feature of the problem that is not covered by any element of the text.


• Overspecification: Thc presence in the text or an element that corresponds not to a feature of the problem but to features of a possible solution.


• Contradiction: The presence in the text of two or more elements that define a feature of the system in an incompatible way.


• Ambiguity: The presence in the text of an element that makes it possible to interpret a feature of the problem in at least two different ways.


• Forward reference: The presence in the text of an clcment that uses features of the problem not defined until later in the text.


• Wishful thinking: The presence in the text of an element that defines a feature of the problem in such a way that a candidate solution cannot realistically be validated with respect to this feature.

I had an opportunity, this week, to reflect on this paper and these basic points on writing a clear and concise specification. They have remained with me since first reading the Paper in the early 1990's. A formative Paper for some one like me who has always struggled to write clearly and concisely.

Bertrand also introduced me to Object-oriented software construction (*) and the The Eiffel Programming Language (*), an elegant way to construct software, that I use everyday to great advantage. Many thanks to Bertrand, who helped equip me with the skills to achieve more than I could have otherwise.

On Branching - Divergence and Convergence - Bertrand Meyer (Tue 01 Oct 2013)

Untitled - Hvar / Croatia (Wed 31 Jul 2013)
Bertrand Meyer (*) writes on the difficulties associated with branching (software development specially, but it could be any human endeavour):

the emergence of separate lines of development with the expectation (*) that they will be merged back later on, is to guarantee disaster.

It is easy to diverge, but hard to converge; not only hard, but unpredictable.

via The laws of branching (part 1) (*) by Bertrand Meyer (*.

Using the Past - Some Advice from Ken Burns, Vern Gambetta and LottieP

The following three quotes are about the past and future, and how we might relate them to each other (if that makes any sense). There is some good advice in all three quotes and I thought that I put them here for future reference, so that they will become part of my past :-). Here they are:

As you pursue your goals in life, that is to say your future, pursue your past. Let it be your guide. Insist on having a past and then you will have a future.
Ken Burns - 2004 Commencement Yale Class Day Speech (as pdf)

Vern Gambetta wisely adds:

Be careful that you are not living in the past, learn from the past, use it as a reference point.

And finally, LottieP warns:

"nostalgia is the enemy of the future"

With the past in mind I thought I would dig into archive.org and drag out something from my past (it might explain the where eljeiffel came from). Here it is:

elj.com (Eiffel Liberty): Two Years On .. by Geoff Eldridge (04 Jul 1999)

Today is Indepedence Day in the USA which celebrates the 223rd birthday, being founded on 4 Jul 1776, with the signing of the Declaration of Independence. This also represents a time of reflection for myself with elj.com (Eiffel Liberty).

It is two years ago since I registered elj.com. The name Eiffel Liberty was easy to come up with. It represented a vision and a hope for Eiffel that somehow it might be liberated from its miserable place in the language landscape (I thought how could such a great contribution, be so categorically and overwhelmingly dismissed by the programming community). Also, Emma Lazarus's words struck a chord with me, particularly

Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost, to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!

Just as America provided opportunity for many from other lands, I thought Eiffel could provide the same kind of opportunities for the syntactically and semantically battered from the other language landscapes :-)

Also, the name Eiffel Liberty made what a I thought was a nice connection between two famous landmarks that Gustave Eiffel had contributed to, being the Eiffel Tower and the Statue of Liberty "Eiffel undertook the challenge of creating the steel structure because of the enormous challenge it afforded him".

The 4 Jul 1997 was to be the launch date for the Eiffel Liberty Journal. However, I came down with a very bad cold (too many late nights preparing for the initial launch) and I decided to publish the launch issue of the Eiffel Liberty Journal, not from my newly acquired elj.com but from my progsoc web pages (this would remain the case for another six months).

It was fun putting together the first issue as I received cooperation from all I contacted. These included:

• Bertrand Meyer who allowed to me publish some small extracts from OOSC2.



• John Potter (my Software Engineering Lecturer who introduced me to Eiffel in the spring of 1993) who specially wrote an article on
  Project Bruce: Translating from Eiffel to Java



• Victor Putz who wrote a great article titled Toymakers and tools: Why one game developer is switching to Eiffel. Victor is a game programmer by night and a helicopter pilot/instructor by day. I remember Victor making a special trip (about 30 km each way) to send me the article because of flooding in his area which made his normal internet access impossible. BTW, I have found that Victor shares and
  articulates (much better than I ever could) my own vision for Eiffel.

Also Bertrand Meyer's classic newsgroup posting from early May 97, Avoiding the second historic mistake (I remember Bertrand once referring to this as collective hypnosis :-) gave the opportunity to publish a few articles from the newsgroup thread that ensued - eg Jeffrey Stulin's If Eiffel is so great, why isn't it popular? and Thomas Beale's Eiffel: An Industry Experience.

I was delighted when Bjarne Stroustrup allowed me to publish Why C++ is not just an Object-Oriented Programming Language and Melier Page Jones allowed me to publish Object Orientation: Making the Transition

Two years on, elj.com has changed from a random journal to a daily random news update covering the Eiffel and related worlds. In many ways elj.com is really just a log of the links and resources I have stumbled across and that I might learn from (or even get a laugh from).

Eiffel certainly enjoys a wider exposure than it did back in 1997. I hope elj.com has helped in a small way. It is hard tell what impact elj.com has had as there is little feedback. However, occasionally I do get a note saying that elj.com helped someone get started with Eiffel, which seems to make it all worthwhile. I guess elj.com could have been much more effective but there is only so much time.

For a number of reasons I renamed Eiffel Liberty to elj.com Extraordinarily Large Jumble in Feb 99 (some of the reasoning behind this was that elj.com was and still is, an Extraordinarily Large Jumble of seemingly random links and more significantly there was little or no Eiffel news). Fortunately, there now appears to be more Eiffel news than I can handle/report manually and I am making efforts to address this through a more automated Eiffel news feed at elj-daily.

elj.com has amassed an incredible amount of links, quotes and resources relating to Eiffel and related worlds. The time has come for elj.com to be able to extract the information from this mass. A keyword/search facility is on the way.

I believe that for [open source] projects to thrive, information needs to readily at hand. I hope the new elj.com that you will see over the coming weeks/months (depends on how much time I get to work on this) will reflect the ability to provide this information efficiently and effectively.

Finally, I would like to acknowledge the support that Jenny has given me over the last few years. She has had to cope (in more ways than one) with more than anyone should reasonably have to tolerate.

Funny to read this after all these years. Shows how strongly I felt about the Eiffel programming language and method (and still do, but not just as visible). I even chose to start this blog with some posts on Eiffel - not the language, but it's inspiration, the Eiffel Tower and it's creator, Gustave Eiffel.

I had better stop here as I think I might be getting a bit nostalgic. Anyway, hoping all of this might help me find the inspiration to get a future project off the ground.

Getting Started

Jenny and Geoff - Paris (Thu 25 Aug 2005)

Need to start again with something. Why not a quote from Gustave Eiffel which started it all for me back in the early 1990's:

Must it be assumed that because we are engineers beauty is not our concern, and that while we make our constructions robust and durable we do not also strive to make them elegant?

Is it not true that the genuine conditions of strength always comply with the secret conditions of harmony?

The first principle of architectural esthetics is that the essential lines of a monument must be determined by a perfect adaptation to its purpose.

Gustave Eiffel, 1887 - From his response in Le Tempsto a petition by members of the literary and artistic Establishment protesting his project of elevating a tower of iron in Paris.