Re: The Promise of Forth

Jonah Thomas wrote:
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

Randomness versus determinism depends on your point of view. It is entirely predictable that large, specialized animals are less tolerant of cataclysmic environmental change than smaller, less specialized animals. And then, orbital mechanics is extremely deterministic. So, was the extinction of T. Rex (but not our mammalian ancestors), apparently due to an asteroid impact, determined or random? Stephen J. Gould called it random.

But in engineering, we get to ask a kind of question that evolution can't address: how could we reengineer T. Rex to survive? Presumably a study of the environmental effects on a living remnant population, along with autopsies on dead specimens, would be enormously useful here. We have access to such information on Forth, but we're not putting it to good use.


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.

In astronomy we're quite used to using statistics to examine historical data. We're not the only ones, either: consider epidemiology. What's needed, though, is a quantitative statistical theory.

--
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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