Eiffel for Universities

Testimonials

Hundreds of universities around the world have been using Eiffel to give their students the best. Here is some of what they have to say:

James Heliotis, Rochester Institute of Technology (USA):

All of us involved in teaching the first-year courses agree that Eiffel has far exceeded our expectations... Eiffel makes it easier to take a complex software system and "open it up" slowly, piece by piece... Thanks to existing libraries full of all kinds of useful data structure, we no longer need to instruct students how to build something before they may use it.

Beyond the language itself, Eiffel Software's offering is an industrial-strength, well-integrated software development environment that supports, and enforces, the use of object-oriented methods throughout.

David Riley, University of Wisconsin La Crosse (USA):

We are currently using Eiffel in our very earliest programming courses. The clean syntax, small collection of primitives, static type checking, and support for design by contract make Eiffel an outstanding choice for instruction in object technology in general and object-oriented programming in particular.

Rob Rist, University of Technology (Australia):

Eiffel is the only language I have ever used that makes me think harder than I want, and it has changed the way I think about system design.

Eiffel is the best language to teach the principles of object-oriented programming. The language itself is so small and elegant that language issues are seldom a problem. This means that the real issue -- design -- can be brought to the front and taught explicitly…Eiffel was created to support reuse, and it achieves what other languages only aim for. I tell my students: "If you repeat code, then your design is wrong". This is a simple rule that is almost always true, and is easily followed by students: it is easy to see repeated code. It is not so easy to fix the design, but that is where skill and expertise come in! Eiffel is so well-designed that the very structure of the language supports the design of reusable solutions.

David Clark, University of Canberra (Australia):

Eiffel engenders a culture of quality. Eiffel actively "pushes" you in the right direction. My OO design / implementation subject focuses on Meyer's "external" quality factors (correctness, robustness, extendibility, reusability). The recurring question is "what can we do internally to achieve the external quality factors?" Always, what we want to do is supported naturally by the language.

Hector Garcia-Molina, University of Murcia (Spain):

Eiffel is the language most adequate to be used as the first object-oriented programming language, because it is a pure object-oriented language, strongly typed, simple and readable. Moreover, it combines the object-oriented concepts with characteristics which are useful for the development of large software projects, such as the assertions and exceptions mechanisms. Since 1991, we have been teaching object-oriented programming using Eiffel.

Dr. James C. McKim, Rensselaer at Hartford (USA):

Eiffel works extremely well as a language through which to learn the O-O paradigm.