News Flash: Microsoft Reinvents Eiffel, 18 Years On

One of the major influences on the middle third of my career thus far was Bertrand Meyer's Eiffel programming language and its concept of design by contract. With such tools, for the first time (at least as far as I was aware), entire classes of software defects could be reliably detected at run time (dynamic checking) and/or at compile time (static checking). I worked on a couple of significant project teams in the mid- to late '90s that used Eiffel quite successfully. Further, it impacted my working style in other languages; for several years, I had a reputation on C and C++ projects for putting far more assert statements than was considered usual by my colleagues. More importantly, it made me start thinking in a different way about how to create working code. Later, as I became aware of automated testing, continuous integration and what is now called agile development, they were all logical extensions of the principles I had already adopted.

This all happened over a period of 15 or so years, in a field where anyone with more than 2 or 3 years' experience is considered "senior". But for me, and most other serious practitioners who I knew and worked with, two to three years was really just about as long as it took to answer more questions than we raised. That, in most crafts, is considered one of the signs of becoming a journeyman rather than a wet-behind-the-ears apprentice.

Then, a few hours ago, I was reading a blog entry by one David R. Heffelfinger which mentioned a project at Microsoft DevLabs called "SmallBasic". Another project that the same organization developed is called "Code Contracts"; there's a nice little set of tools (which will be built into the upcoming Visual Studio 2010 product), and a nice introductory video. Watch the video (you'll need Silverlight to view it), and then do some research on Eiffel and design-by-contract and so on, and it's very difficult not to see the similarities.

So, on the one hand, I'm glad that .NET developers will finally be getting support for 20-year-old concepts (by the time significant numbers of developers use VS 2010 and .NET 4.0). Anything that helps improve the developer and user experiences on Windows (or, in fact, any platform) is by definition a Good Thing™.

On the other hand, I see more evidence of Microsoft's historical Not Invented Here mentality; beating the drum for "new and wonderful ideas for Windows development" that developers on other platforms have been using effectively for some time. While the Code Contracts project indirectly credits Eiffel - the FAQ page links to Spec# at Microsoft Research, which lists Eiffel as one of its influences - it would have been nice to see acknowledgement and explanation of precursor techniques be made more explicitly. Failure to do so merely reinforces the wisdom of Santayana as applied to software: "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it", as well as "Fanaticism consists in redoubling your efforts when you have forgotten your aim." This last is something that we who wish to improve our craft would do well to remember.

What do you all think?