Re: The Promise of Forth

Jonah Thomas wrote:
Bruce McFarling <agila61@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
John Doty <j...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

The confirmed hypothesis is the best hypothesis when no other
testable hypothesis is on the table.
I don't see the relevance to the case at hand, but if there was a
hypothesis that had not been rejected by evidence that had
contradicted all others offered, then the more tests and the more
other hypotheses rejected by those tests, the more weight given to the
hypothesis.

OK, what's the confirmed hypothesis here? I'll say it in my own words
and see if John agrees that this is his meaning. He may not agree; I may
have misunderstood, and if he says he means something different then
I'll have a chance to understand better.

John says the only testable hypothesis that has been proposed, the
confirmed hypothesis, is:

Forth as it is used is inadequate for professional programming because
it doesn't well enough fit the way real people think.

I care little for "professional programming" in the sense of programming by computer professionals. I care a lot about programming by professionals for whom computer skills are secondary support skills. Those are the people actually putting computers to use. And they're my customers.

It is not adequate
as a *language*. This is confirmed by the fact that not many people use
Forth, the fact that Forth has lost the footholds it had in some niches
that John knows about, and the fact that many people have heard that
Forth is unreadable,

Do you *really* believe that a statistician would judge }find readable?

and they have heard that Forth programmers can't
read their own code.

I haven't heard that from anyone but Mike Coughlin. However, rather than deny it, consider that it comes from one of the academic settings where Forth was once popular.


No matter how many alternative hypotheses have been put forth to explain
these three facts, John says there is only one hypothesis on the table.

Consider the alternatives that have been proposed:

1. The powerful institutions hypothesis.

The claim is that powerful institutions were behind Forth's lack of success. But what languages did the powerful institutions favor? PL/I and Ada. Not exactly dominant. C? C and Unix made AT&T powerful in general-purpose computing, not the other way around.

2. The academic NIH hypothesis.

This is more historical revisionism. Forth was nurtured at NRAO, an academic research institution. Forth was widely appreciated in academia from ~1975-1985 (I was there). If there was any NIH syndrome, it worked the other way: the Forth establishment rejected later improvements (STOIC, MAGIC/L) that originated in academia.

3. The nothing hypothesis

This assumes that, despite Forth's advantages, the users who have abandoned it had no real reason to, and are simply idiots. Sorry, some of them are extremely smart people.

Perhaps he believes none of the other hypotheses are testable and that
this one is testable.

No, most fail tests.


The immediate consequence if John's hypothesis is true is that people
who use Forth should quit using Forth and instead should design a
language that will fit the way other people think.

Not really. But serious attempts to improve Forth will be appreciated.

"Underground Forths are still needed."

They will know
they've succeeded when the new language is used by many people, it
spreads into new niches, and most people agree that it is easy to read.

I propose that the measure of language success is published code in wide use. The reasons people give for not using a language only matter when this is absent. A published code base would be a powerful lever to get Forth into applications (it sure works for other languages). But these days, I'm writing embedded code in C because that's what the customer wants (gdb, ugh).

--
John Doty, Noqsi Aerospace, Ltd.
http://www.noqsi.com/
--
History teaches that logical consistency is neither sufficient nor necessary to establish practical, real world truth. Those who attempt to use logic for that purpose are abusing it.
.

Relevant Pages

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