Re: Forth and Unix -- history

Stephen Pelc wrote:
On Mon, 17 Dec 2007 17:15:58 -0700, John Doty
<jpd@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

I've personally known FIGforth users. I've personally known STOIC users. I've personally known MAGIC/L users. I've personally known LSE users (and I exclude LSE64, because those users are my own doing). I've never, as far as I know, met a Standard Forth user in person. You and Elizabeth must keep them locked up ;-). Or perhaps there are just very few.

Excepting LSE64, the systems mentioned are very old. As a commercial
vendor, I know that supporting the retro nostalgics is not a paying
business.

Those are the systems I have actually seen used. Newer systems are used by so few people that I've never met a user. These older systems attracted users, but modern Forths mostly drive them away.

And what's modern about modern Forths anyway? Yours even has a text interpreter! How backward! You have no justification to call STOIC retro nostalgia given that Standard Forth is pretty much stuck in the mid 70's.


Our experience is that clients who insist on staying with obsolete
tools eventually get cross with the vendor. After all, they were
right to stay with the obsolete system, and it must be the vendor's
fault that the obsolete system does not cope with modern
requirements! The same behaviour pattern has been observed by
toolmakers for other languages.

These users have moved to more modern tools. But those tools are not Forth.


Most of the world has adapted with C. I have to deal with that. But as I see it, it's more that C has adapted to the world, and Forth has not.

C is a very simple language. Its power comes from the libraries,
standard or otherwise.

That's a large part of its power, yes. And the fact that users perceive it as simple is a huge advantage, too.

Forth is also a simple language. Arguing
about language purity has little impact on users,

But making the language simple to comprehend has a huge impact.

whereas providing
high level libraries has a big impact. That's why the vendors
concentrate on providing facilities rather than arguing about
kernels and their purity.

Users provide a large fraction of those libraries for C. Publicly. But what's there for Forth? The FSL? Oh, come on, compare it with the GSL and be humiliated. Not in the same league.

And Python has grown by leaps and bounds largely because of its tremendous collection of published modules. But of course, users must find the language comfortable in order to create such things.

Where are *your* published, portable libraries? Private libraries make a language no friends.


I'm a rampant pragmatist.

If you were a rampant pragmatist you'd be importing a lot more C. And using other languages, too. And working on a real 21st century Forth, not the retro nostalgia of Standard Forth.


Specialization is for robots.

I suspect that you are more specialised than you think.

Evaluating other Forth systems is hard work. Despite this,
most of the vendors I know actually have other people's Forths
installed on their boxes. I have at least seven on my PC. It's not always a comfortable experience to use them, but we
always learn something and the experience contributes to the
improvement of our products. Perhaps you should try this too.

I've played with gforth. It's a mess, but the problems stem from the things it has in common with other Standard Forths. An exercise in retro nostalgia, not ready for the 21st century. But if I saw actual users out here in the wild using a Forth, that would get a lot of my attention. Nobody I know in engineering or science uses Forth anymore. Existing published Forth code would lead one to believe that Forth's dominant niche is Sudoku solvers.


Stephen




--
John Doty, Noqsi Aerospace, Ltd.
http://www.noqsi.com/
--
Specialization is for robots.
.

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