I was going for a more publicly visible presence with "we might see". Don't know anything about the numbers, but I'd put Eiffel Studio with e.g. GemStone SmallTalk or Allegro Common Lisp or even current Delphi. Or, heck, Tcl/Tk and Ada, doesn't have to be about proprietary vs open source (cf. IntelliJ vs Eclipse).

But from what I've seen, I wouldn't mind it to become a bit more popular, more libraries, more publicly available applications. More rising tide lifting boats than secret weapon.

(NB: not that you'd need to be a secret weapon to keep a business afloat, there are a lot of companies that run on legacy support. There's nothing inherently better in paid software. Also: Eiffel the language vs Eiffel Studio.)

Eiffel the language has been available in some variants for free, for a couple of decades.

https://www.liberty-eiffel.org/

http://smarteiffel.loria.fr/

Just like with Smalltalk and Common Lisp, a language without the respective developer experience, isn't that attractive.

For a while SmartEiffel did enjoy some popularity, bindings to libraries where created etc. But it fell back, Eiffel moved on, and so did fickle OSS developers. And while Bertrand Meyer succeeded Niklaus Wirth as a professor at ETH Zurich, Eiffel didn't succeed Pascal in popularity as an academic programming language.

And did you actually like the EiffelStudio dev experience? I thought that was the weakest part of the whole offering (as opposed to CL and SmallTalk, by the way). And I like BON about as much as UML.

Yes, in the sense that it is much better than using plain vi or emacs. Smalltalk and CL are hard to beat, I do agree there.

I do enjoy using UML, not the extreme case of compiling UML to native code as promised in the 90's, but surely for application architecture and data flows.

I was quite pleased that my previous customer allowed externals access to their Enterprise Architect pool licenses.