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Comment by zasdffaa | Hacker News Reader

I didn't like it. It was too much theory based without enough recognition of practice. I and a very small company used it ~25 years ago. It wasn't good enough & we eventually dumped it. I can't give you reasons why as it was too long ago but I don't have a good memory of it.

I do remember of the Eiffel book that Meyer was a bit too keen on emotive arguments over factual.

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"The difference between theory and practice is greater in practice than in theory."--Herb Sutter

"In theory there is no difference between theory and practice - in practice there is" (Yogi Berra)

"I really didn't say all the things I said." (Yogi Berra: https://quoteinvestigator.com/2012/12/30/yogi-didnt-say/#:~:...

Sutter's rendition (from C++ User's Journal some decades ago) has a more poetic feel, in my wildly subjective opinion.

The zeal/tunnel vision of early OOP evangelists resembles the zeal of today's FP evangelists...

(Edited the following)

I'm not talking about OOP. Meyer was hard on pre and postconditions (which were massively oversold), but these were functionally no more than assertions. He had holes in his object system. He had holes in other parts of the type system. He was not an object zealot IIRC.

I took some classes from him while he was at ETH.

Ok, post modified, but still I don't feel you've represented him entirely fairly.

It could have been interpreted badly - I was just pointing out he was from the generation that pushed OOP everywhere similarly to FP folks these days, and downplaying the problems inherent in Eiffel/OOP, similarly to FP folks that see no major issues in their own space. A single sentence can't explain the massive contribution he had on programming and Agile anyway.

I misinterpreted it because there's a rash of people who post throwaway dismissive stuff (always without any justification) and yours looked exactly like that. So, my apologies. I'd suggest a mention of your personal experience would have been valuable here; actually getting lessons off the guy is a big deal.

Ahh... in a sense, that's like Hype-Driven Development, where everything new becomes the solution for everything... https://blog.daftcode.pl/hype-driven-development-3469fc2e9b2...

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