Re: An Observation

Stephen J. Bevan wrote:
John Doty <jpd@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> writes:
Parsing SIP isn't a made up toy problem, but it's not an
application. It is systems programming in support of a class of
applications. It isn't a good test of the suitability of a language
for applications.

So what SIP based applications have you written that you base this
conclusion on? Parsing SIP (and the SDP that is typically contains)
consists of 90% of the code required to enable SIP to correctly flow
through a NA(P)T firewall and open the required RTP ports to allow
VoiP calls to establish. If that isn't an application by your
definition then whatever LSE64 is good for, it isn't good for anything
any of my customers care about.

Certainly it's the kind of programming a narrow specialist is comfortable with. LSE isn't intended for narrow specialists.

...
No, but they suffer from similar design problems, fundamentally a lack
of attention to *human* communication.

Ah, yes, I forgot that C paid so much attention to to *human*
communication.

Go read some of the stuff Ritchie wrote on the history of Unix. Those guys understood explicitly that they were engaged in a *social* activity. It was the Licklider/Project MAC approach, but they captured it better at Bell Labs than the folks at its home at MIT.

Remember that Licklider was a psychologist, and he had a *lot* of influence in this community.



Where does Forth belong in the 21st century software picture?

Probably where it is now, mainly in the niche of systems with limited
amounts of memory.

It's only in a very small part of that niche. Paging through the Digikey catalog I see plenty of C and Basic development systems for this niche, but no Forth. It's all but extinct there too.

I deny that this is the only place Forth belongs. LSE has been successful there (and may soon return), but all of its current applications run on gigabyte machines.



From where I sit, it looks pretty close to extinct...

So what if Forth is mostly gone from the environment where it was
first created,

It's mostly gone from *all* environments.

nobody cries that Unix is extinct because it isn't the
#1 solution for document processing.

Unix remains *very* strong in the area of technical document processing. While TeX has largely replaced troff in scientific publishing, it's recognizably a member of the same family of markup languages (and troff itself was based on an earlier pre-Unix markup language). A nice evolution.

Where you sit isn't where others
who are making a living using Forth sit.

Yes. There are a few small oases surrounded by a gigantic desert.

--
John Doty, Noqsi Aerospace, Ltd.
--
Specialization is for robots.
.

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