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.

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.

Getting Started - 4 Years On Today ..

The Eiffel Tower - The first time I saw the Eiffel Tower - Paris (Wed 24 Aug 2005)

Jenny and Geoff - Paris (Thu 25 Aug 2005)
It all started with this little challenge (*) by Seth Godin (*) on the Tue 24 Feb 2009 to celebrate his 3,000th blog post:

if you'd like to celebrate this milestone (there won't be another like it for three years or so) please go ahead and start a blog. If you already have a blog, please go ahead and post something really interesting today.

A few days later I would take up the challenge and I posted my 1st blog post here at eljeiffel (*) titled Getting Started (*). Since I had been blogging (the term had not been developed back then) for the period between 1997 and 2003, I looked to my experiences back then and I started again with a small quote (*) from Gustave Eiffel about essentially function and form.

I won't go on as I think I touched on what I have learnt about myself and life, over the last 4 or so years, in my 1,000th blog post (*) back in Aug 2012. All I will say is that it has been challenging, rewarding and interesting for me, at least, and I am glad I took up Seth's challenge back on Thu 26 Feb 2009. The act of creating, editing and the resulting archive (*), seems to give me some comfort and a way to reflect on who I was, who I am and (maybe an inkling to) who I hope to be.

Geoff - A Small Statue / Sculpture of Gustave Eiffel - He designed the structural skeleton for the Statue of Liberty - Liberty Island / New York (Mon 15 Aug 2011)

[photo] Eiffel Tower

Eiffel Tower - Paris - 26 Aug 2005
Eiffel Tower - Paris - 26 Aug 2005
Eiffel Tower - Paris - 26 Aug 2005

Panama - Eddie Van Halen / Paul Shaffer and The World's Most Dangerous Band - David Letterman - 1984 (youtube)

Panama - Eddie Van Halen / Paul Shaffer and The World's Most Dangerous Band - David Letterman - 1984 (youtube)
Random Recollection - Back in my Eiffel days, I suggested the name Panama, for an Eiffel-like derivative scripting language, based on the fact that Gustave Eiffel had been involved (controversially) in the creation of the Panama Canal. The suggestion was well received, however a little bit searching found that the name had already taken by Oracle (more here). The language would be ultimately named Amber.

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

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

Eiffel Tower #2 - Paris (Tue 16 Sep 2014)

Eiffel Tower #2 - Paris (Tue 16 Sep 2014)

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.

Getting Started - Bernadette / The Story of Telling (Mon 01 Dec 2014)

Eiffel Tower #3 - Paris (Tue 16 Sep 2014)
Bernadette (*) writes on Getting Started (*):

The best way to do anything is to begin, then to adjust your course based on what happens next.

via What’s The Best Way? (*) by The Story of Telling (*).

I did this when I started out (*) on this blog (*) almost 6 years ago. And I am still doing it 1750 posts (this post being it) later.

On Friends - Anastasia Taylor-Lind - Colin Pantall's blog (Fri 18 Oct 1013)

Uwe, Olja and Geoff - Herford (*) / Germany (Tue 20 Aug 2013)
Anastasia Taylor-Lind (*) writes On Friends (*):

Have a stable of friends and colleagues [..] these people can give you enough encouragement (*), motivation (*) and self-belief (*) to plough on and develop ..

via Dos and Don'ts of Anastasia Taylor-Lind (*) on Colin Pantall's blog (*).

Had the pleasure of meeting up with Uwe again after 13 years, and also to meet Olja for the first time. Thank you, you were great hosts.

It was nice to recount some old memories - Uwe was the driving force behind some amazing projects, back in the early days of open-source software in the Eiffel World - the eljeiffel project (this blog was a long dormant result of the project). I still use some of the resulting software tools and programing concepts on a daily basis.

It was great to talk about what has happened in the intervening years since we last met, as well as what is happening in our lives now, along with our future hopes.

I look forward to you being my guests sometime in the near future.

On A Touch of Squalor - Daido Moriyama / Telegraph (Tue 23 Oct 2012)

Garbage Bins - Sumida / Tokyo (Fri 21 Sep 2012)
Daido Moriyama (*) is quoted in Daido Moriyama: Low life in Tokyo (*):

I’ve never been attracted to places that are very hygienic. I like a touch of squalor.

The a touch of squalor quote reminded me of my Eiffel Days (*) and the superbly named book A Touch of Class: Learning to Program Well with Objects and Contracts (*).

On William Eggleston - Matthew Israel (Wed 24 Sep 2014)

Eiffel Tower - Paris (Tue 16 Sep 2014)
Matthew Israel (*) writes William Eggleston (*):

In Eggleston's world, objects often fray at the edges, erode or allude to the underside of society.

via Is This the Most Important Photograph of the 20th Century? (*) by Matthew Israel (*).

Shake it Out - Florence + The Machine / Saturday Night Live (Sat 19 Nov 2011)

Florence + The Machine - Shake It Out (Live on SNL)

I have always loved live performance. The display of skill and passion, along with the rawness being the appeal. And this is the best from the last 7 years here at eljeiffel.

"Oh The Drama" in the Lyrics. And an amazing Performance . Wow!! You can see it in her. That she is loving what she is doing and thst she is sharing her gift to move us.

To the lyrics, I would add my own Optimistic and Naive view of Life and the World ..

you can't keep a good dog down [..]

a candle burns brightest before it goes out [..]

Such a nice song and performance to finish on here at eiffel. As they say:

a star burns brightest before it dies

And this is how it has felt this last year, particularly the last few months.

And so it is onto the last few posts, where my work will be done here.

Shake it Out - Florence + The Machine (Lyrics)

Regrets collect like old friends
Here to relive your darkest moments
I can see no way, I can see no way
And all of the ghouls come out to play

And every demon wants his pound of flesh
But I like to keep some things to myself
I like to keep my issues drawn
It's always darkest before the dawn

And I've been a fool and I've been blind
I can never leave the past behind
I can see no way, I can see no way
I'm always dragging that horse around

All of his questions, such a mournful sound
Tonight I'm gonna bury that horse in the ground
So I like to keep my issues drawn
But it's always darkest before the dawn

Shake it out, shake it out, shake it out, shake it out, ooh whoa
Shake it out, shake it out, shake it out, shake it out, ooh whoa
And it's hard to dance with a devil on your back
So shake him off, oh whoa

And I am done with my graceless heart
So tonight I'm gonna cut it out and then restart
'Cause I like to keep my issues drawn
It's always darkest before the dawn

Shake it out, shake it out, shake it out, shake it out, ooh whoa
Shake it out, shake it out, shake it out, shake it out, ooh whoa
And it's hard to dance with a devil on your back
So shake him off, oh whoa

And it's hard to dance with a devil on your back
And given half the chance would I take any of it back
It's a fine romance but it's left me so undone
It's always darkest before the dawn

Oh whoa, oh whoa...

And I'm damned if I do and I'm damned if I don't
So here's to drinks in the dark at the end of my road
And I'm ready to suffering and I'm ready to hope
It's a shot in the dark aimed right at my throat
'Cause looking for heaven, found the devil in me
Looking for heaven, found the devil in me
Well what the hell I'm gonna let it happen to me, yeah

Shake it out, shake it out, shake it out, shake it out, ooh whoa
Shake it out, shake it out, shake it out, shake it out, ooh whoa
And it's hard to dance with a devil on your back
So shake him off, oh whoa

Shake it out, shake it out, shake it out, shake it out, ooh whoa
Shake it out, shake it out, shake it out, shake it out, ooh whoa
And it's hard to dance with a devil on your back
So shake him off, oh whoa

And out of the the darkeness a new bright light will glow ..

Shake it Out - Florence + The Machine - Saturday Night Live (Sat 19 Nov 2011)

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.

Two Arcs - Sydney Harbour (Mon 10 Sep 2001)

Two Arcs - Sydney Harbour (Mon 10 Sep 2001)
David Malouf (*) writes On The Sydney Opera House (*) which 40 years ago appeared near the Sydney Harbour Bridge (*) as :

a new emblem [..] and Sydneysiders immediately saw the two as mirrors of one another, the arc of the bridge and its broken reflection; another arc, but divided now into sections and fitted one inside the next. The new force ran between the two. Like the force in Paris that runs between Notre Dame and the Eiffel Tower, and in Rome between the Colosseum, the Pantheon and Michelangelo's St Peter's.

via Angel of Bennelong Point (*) by David Malouf (*).

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.

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 (*).