Re: The Promise of Forth

John Doty <jpd@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

As long as you claim an untestable hypothesis qualifies as a null
hypothesis in the scientific sense, it is impossible to reason with
you.

What do you think it would take to test a null hypothesis?

What would it take in this particular case? Say one hypothesis is:

There's something wrong with Forth that prevented it from taking over
the computing world

and the alternative hypothesis is:

Network advantages ensured that some at-least-adequate language would
be come temporarily dominant in each niche, and random events decided
which language it was

What would we do to test which of these was true?

My problem here is that it appears we have only one history to go by,
and we can't do very good statistics on that.
.