Re: How does forth' productivity compare to the scripting languages?


Julian V. Noble wrote:
casioculture@xxxxxxxxx wrote:

I was looking at the gforth benchmarks against ruby, python etc and
it's much much faster, it uses less memory, but what about programmer's
productivity? how would that compare? Say someone with 5-10 years of
experience in gforth compared to someone with 5-10 of years experience
in a scripting language (ruby, python... etc), both used in a
comparable domain to ease the comparison.


I can only speak from my personal experience. I programmed exclusively
in FORTRAN for about 12 years, then learned Basic (because it was like
FORTRAN and was the language of the HP-2000 time-shared computers we
had around then). The interactive Basic was more productive than FOR-
TRAN in the sense that I could get programs working much faster. But
this was because FORTRAN ran in batch mode, Basic in time-shared. When
we got a time-shared FORTRAN (VAX-750, IIRC) I was about as productive
in either. However, when I started to program in Forth in 1985 or so,
it did not take long before I could get programs debugged about 5x
faster than in either FORTRAN or Basic, despite my being expert in
both of those and only a novice in Forth.

At some point I stopped using other languages except when forced to.
For example, I had to learn some C in order to teach a numerical
methods course effectively. I found programming in C like slogging
uphill through treacle in midwinter. And I was using Turbo C so it
was nearly interactive. Perhaps it would have become easier as I
became more fluent, but I don't see how I could have programmed C
faster than I did Basic. And Basic was, for me, much slower to pro-
gram in than Forth.

Ahhh! There's an interesting retrospection :-). As I said in another
post, if a more formal study was not yet conducted to compare the
languages, as mentioned by the OP, through time, these accumulated
retrospections are the closest we are going to get to forming a more
precise idea.

Regards
Jean-Francois Michaud

.

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