Re: An Observation

Stephen J. Bevan wrote:
John Doty <jpd@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> writes:
Certainly it's the kind of programming a narrow specialist is
comfortable with. LSE isn't intended for narrow specialists.

We are communicating right via a network of computers running software
that solve problems virtually identical to the SIP one I described.

And very little of this is in Forth.

Thus I assume all those problems are "the kind of programming a narrow
specialist is comfortable with". If so then "narrow specialist" seems
a rather odd label but if you need a label to define away problems
that LSE64 can't handle then so be it. At least it clears up what
LSE64 is not any good at.

I deny that LSE couldn't be good at this, but as I have no interest in solved problems I have no motivation to work on it. It certainly is a very narrow area of the programming universe.



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.

Unix is not C. If you have a *specific* paper/book about C in mind
then reference it.

Unix and C came from the same minds, the same culture. They were *very* aware that they were engaged in a social activity. But it doesn't really matter. I'm confident that any reasonably unbiased sample of computer users would judge C code more readable by humans than Standard Forth code.



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.

So what? You want to quibble about the size of the niche?

Forth's niche used to be very large, encompassing much of the kind of work I'm interested in. Now it's so small it's hard to find. Maybe that doesn't matter to you, but it matters to me.



It's mostly gone from *all* environments.

So what? Why does it have to exist in all environments? APL is
mostly gone from all environements, but if you want to analyze
stockmarket data it is hard to find anything better than K (an APL
derivative). Use the right tool for the job.

You seem to be agreeing with me that Standard Forth is rarely the right tool for any job. The evidence I see suggests that most computer users agree: few ever choose Forth. But it seems to me that Forth *technique* remains valuable as an approach to a broad range of problems. At least that's why I'm here.



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.

Unix was used by Bell labs secretaries to prepare documents.

Rarely anywhere else I know of. The "runoff" family of markup languages was mostly used by techies (I typeset my PhD thesis in Multics runoff). The secretaries who moved to PC's came from typewriters or specialized word processing machines from companies like Wang.

How many
secretaries in 2007 use any flavour of Unix to prepare documents let
alone use troff, eqn and pic?

I don't know what they use at Bell Labs these days. I know that while Forth retreated from its broad position into a few tiny niches, Unix advanced far beyond document processing. And I know many people who still use Unix for document processing. But the only remaining Forth users I know personally use LSE64, at my instigation.

MacOS (10) is about as close as you'll
get but it is more than likely running Microsoft Word, the secretary
never sees the command line and might as well be running MacOS 9 or
Microsoft Windows for all the difference it makes to how they prepare
a document using Word. You can still find people using Unix to
prepare documents (I do, using LaTeX), but it is a niche compared to
vast majority who use Word.

An enormous niche compared to Forth's.



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.

Again, so what? Forth isn't suddently going to make large inroads
into the gigantic desert, it isn't a local optimum for most of the
desert.

It used to own much of the desert.

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

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