Re: The Promise of Forth

Guy Macon wrote:
John Doty wrote:
Jonah Thomas wrote:

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.

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,

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

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.

I find it interesting that when I did an analysis of your logic
a while back you got real quiet all of a sudden, but here you are once again trying to make the same points that I refuted.

I also find it interesting that you have once again ignored the null hypothesis, and instead substituted a strawman that you call "the nothing hypothesis."

At first I found it strange that someone who works with scientists would be ignorant of the null hypothesis, but now that I see you pretending that nobody mentioned the null hypothesis after I explained it to you in detail (Null Hypothesis, meet John Doty. John Doty, Meet Null Hypothesis...) I can only conclude that the omission is deliberate.

Let's review, shall we?

So far, at least *THREE* people have told you:

"The effects you cite are not *necessarily* the result of the cause to which you attribute them." -ER

"This conclusion does not follow from the premises." -AH

"you simply assume without evidence that A leads to B, never ever examining whether that assumption is warranted."-GM

....and yet the only argument that you can come up with is "there is no alternative hypothesis."

According to standard scientific method, when considering the merits of the "failings in the language" hypothesis, the null hypothesis is all other explanations, known and unknown, combined.

Thus the "historical accident" hypothesis (the hypothesis that some languages become popular by sheer luck) -- which you conveniently left out of your list of "the alternatives that have been proposed" above -- is a proper subset of the null hypothesis and a clear alternative to your "failings in the language" hypothesis.

OK, so you *finally* state that your hypothesis is in fact not a "null" hypothesis at all, but that Forth's decline is a historical accident.

This is not credible. It would be credible if Forth had never passed the threshold of awareness necessary to gain widespread use. But Forth's success at NOAO gave it a *lot* of attention. From brilliant people. It had a lot of users ~1980 in my world. Brilliant people don't just walk away from effective tools.


This is why your argument that there exists no other hypothesis and therefor the "failings in the language" hypothesis must be correct is an invalid argument. You can't simply pit your favorite hypothesis against all the others that you can think
of. You have to pit it against *all* possible reasons (known or unknown), including the hypothesis that there is no cause
and effect relationship and that the correlation is simply the
product of random chance.

What random chance? People usually don't throw dice to choose tools. People especially don't throw dice to decide whether they will abandon effective tools.

You need to show some sort of evidence that the effect is really due to the cause and not just due to chance.

You have no evidence that chance is involved here at all.



References to ignore:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Null_hypothesis http://www.stats.gla.ac.uk/steps/glossary/hypothesis_testing.html#hypothtest http://www.stats.gla.ac.uk/steps/glossary/hypothesis_testing.html#h0
http://davidmlane.com/hyperstat/A29337.html
http://davidmlane.com/hyperstat/A73664.htmlhttp://davidmlane.com/hyperstat/A72620.html
http://davidmlane.com/hyperstat/A73079.html
http://www.britannica.com/eb/topic-422222/null-hypothesis
http://sociologyindex.com/null_hypothesis.htm



When you come up with a detailed statistical model, these might be relevant. Until then...

--
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.
.

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