Re: An Observation

Elizabeth D Rather wrote:
John Doty wrote:
...
....
You might get increased acceptance for your Forth when you can
legitimately call it a standard Forth system.

My customers don't care. But if someone cares about standards I can call it a lightweight, simple, flexible, fast, easy to learn scripting language in standard C. At least they'll have heard of that.

Maybe your customers don't care, but a number of the large companies we work with find the existence of an ANSI Standard to be extremely important for management acceptance.

So you're not dealing with the people who actually have problems to solve.

Excuse me, how does that follow? Why are these people bothering with software at all unless they have problems to solve?

They're not focused on the problem, they're focused on institutional politics.


....
People can program your way without worrying that it only
runs on your compilers.

My compiler is portable and published under the GPL. Where's the worry? It's users of commercial Forths who have to worry.

If you were run over by the proverbial truck tomorrow, your customers would be in a fix.

Why? They have full, unencumbered portable source. Any programmer familiar with GNU development conventions (and there are quite a few of those around) could maintain it. My software skills are easily replaceable. The place they'd be in trouble is finding an analog EE who could understand my hardware designs: those are sometimes rather eccentric (but they can do things conventional designs can't).

They'll have trouble finding someone else who understands LSE64.

But *they* understand it. They learned it from reading the code and the docs. The only LSE64 code I've written in months has been little one liners for bench testing hardware. A couple of months ago I had a conversation that went like this:

Me: "I owe you LSE code to operate ..."
Customer: "We can write that ourselves. But we need [an EE job] ..."

They're self sufficient in LSE64. But I still have plenty of work ;-)


FORTH, Inc. customers, in contrast, can count on the company supporting them even though our personnel changes.

Who would take over for you if *you* were hit by a truck.

It's happened, in effect. I'm semi-retired now. We have excellent people carrying on at FORTH, Inc. I have never been indispensable.

We have some customers we've supported since the mid-1970's, through extensive changes of hardware and software on their side, and personnel on ours. We've also taken on customers of other vendors who are out of business now, with relatively little transition pain. I think, from the snippets of code you've posted here, we'd have a lot more trouble helping your customers.

Why on Earth would they go to you then?

Because we do excellent work, at reasonable prices, on schedule.

But you already said you'd have a lot of trouble here. The truth is that you wouldn't have trouble if you didn't fight the language: you could learn LSE64 in about 20 minutes if you wanted to. The trouble is all in your mind: LSE64 is outside your box.

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

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