Re: The Promise of Forth

John Doty <jpd@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
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.

You forgot two already offered explanations:

(4) The "OS and a bundle of other tools" hypothesis:

Forth evolved in circumstances where a general operating system was not
available and where its integrated tools worked as a substitute.
When general operating systems became available, this advantage faded.
The OS permitted the use of a variety of different languages and other
tools. Within academe, Unix became the most popular OS. The language
which had been used to implement Unix became popular as a standard
implementation language for software to be developed under Unix.
Among the variety of languages used in CS, C is the only one which has
not been adopted because of some features of the language itself, but
because it came with the favoured OS.


(5) The educational hypothesis:

Unlike with other small languages (most notably Lisp, Scheme and Prolog),
the early academic users of Forth were not involved in teaching it.
This was of little consequence at a time when students would pick up
computer programming along the way outside a formal curriculum.
When such formal curricula evolved, they widened the gap between those
languages used in teaching and those languages which did not enter
the curriculum in a significant way.

Marc
.

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