Perhaps I have just been exposed to too much Python in the recent months. But somehow, I feel like I have to express the qualities that I expect from a good programming language. Eiffel has these, most others don't.

• Programs have to be easier to read than write: Code not only communicates a solution from a programmer to a computer.

Designing a programming language is an difficult task. During my time in academia, I had the great pleasure to meet some language designers. Listening to their stories is highly educating. Things that look simple or arbitrary at first become deep insights into the way humans understand problems and model solutions. There is nothing trivial in deciding names of keywords or punctuation.

The search for a type-safe version of Eiffel is a never-ending story in the development of the Eiffel language. Recently, Helmuth Brandl has created a series of blog entries with a nice description of is needed to make Eiffel type-safe. There have been others posting blog entries (including me) and it also had been a constant topic during the ECMA process of Eiffel standardization.

Interestingly, a question that was seldom raised was: why do we need type-safety? As absurd as it seems for all the mathematicians to raise this question, the Eiffel community has understood for a long time that mathematical soundness is not a reason in itself. Instead, it serves a purpose in the enterprise of language design: giving software developers means to express themselves in ways that reduce the number of defects in his/her programs and enable him/her to master complex problems he/she would not be able to master without.

This is a very nice bug that I stumbled into while running the great auto_test tool on some code I had written. It is a beautiful example of a bug, because it is a very small bug that is still nearly undetectable for the average developer. Also, I do not know about any formal verification tool that could reveal the bug.

The lifetime of an Eiffel program is currently defined by the creation procedure of the root class (normally called 'make' in class 'APPLICATION'). When the creation of terminates, the Eiffel program terminates, too.

There are many discussions on how to make Eiffel type-safe. The ECMA committee has been very active in coming up with solutions (though non of these solutions have been fully implemented and analysed).