Re: Standard Discussion Again

Aleksej Saushev wrote:
"Ed" <nospam@xxxxxxxxxxx> writes:

"Aleksej Saushev" <asau@xxxxxxxx> wrote in message news:8763vgf01h.fsf@xxxxxxxxxxx
Elizabeth D Rather <erather@xxxxxxxxx> writes:

...
The Forth94 TC had members from all parts of the country, plus
Canada and Europe. We met in different parts of the country
every time, and encouraged participation from local Forthers at
every meeting. The Boston group was the only one to actively
oppose our efforts; the TC received broad support from
hobbyists, professional Forthers, and vendors.

Since the passage of Forth94, the fragmentation of the Forth
community is considerably lessened.
That's because the community collapsed, archives at Taygeta reflect
this pretty well.
Some of that is due to the internet. The www has made it easy for
individuals to set up their own sites, message boards etc. Forth
material is thus spread wide and far (and more difficult to find).

Another false excuse.

Before the Internet, it was easier to put your stuff on your own BBS,
or the one nearby, than posting it on binary echo mailing list.

BBS and online services like WELL and Compuserv were never as ubiquitous as the internet, nor did they offer the ease of entry that the internet offers.

For example, I recall that the only way I could get a list of local BBS numbers was to find numbers in a computer magazine. One I had those, I had to guess which ones might be useful, and call long-distance in the middle of the night to collect enough information about my local scene. It took me months to find a local hackerish BBS (and it even ran on Forth and CP/M). We didn't even have a local FIG until we created it.

This is a far cry from a hobbyist or engineer who recalls fondly hacking on Forth into the night plugging "forth computer language" into Google and instantly getting a pretty complete overview of the state of the world, and where to go next.

Anyone who has ever participating in a discussion at 300 baud (back when signalling rate was equivalent to bits/sec) knows the value of actually meeting the second-Monday-of-the-month.

Because the internet works so well, and is so easy to access, it has obviated many of the reasons why a lot of hobbyists used to meet regularly face-to-face. This is true for a great number of subjects other than Forth. Amateur radio groups, homebrew computer enthusiasts, car hackers, robotics freaks and so on have found that face-to-face meetings are, at best, annual meetings now.

This is not to say there is no value in such user meetings; I'm just saying that pretending that pervasive and ubiquitous internet did not replace a good portion of what user groups have to offer is misunderstanding why people meet like this in the first place.

At any rate, I've shown up to a few Perl Mongers meetings in my locale, and quite frankly we just drink beer, shoot the *** and talk about almost everything /except/ for Perl.

So, stating that "Some of that is due to the internet" is a well-established and reasonable statement, given recent history.

I still use Taygeta to backup forth material that may be useful to
others in the event my webpages should vanish. I wish others
would too.

Forth-94 struck me as being quite conservative - which is what
a standard has to be.

Scheme and Python present quite the opposite point of view,
and they are more successful than Forth at the same time.
So you may be wrong, as well, as the commitee. It is possible,
isn't it?

"Success" for a programming language can be a fleeting and capricious thing. It really depends on how you measure something as slippery as success, and whether this success really matters at all to people using the language.

And Scheme? This is quite possibly the most lauded language that few actually use outside of universities.

I think it should be ok that Forth does not fit the problem spaces that some other people use Ruby, Python, Perl, C++, Java, FooLang for. We are more than ever in a world where technologies have had to carve out their niches and establish their fans.

Eventually, any of these tools may eventually diminish in their usefulness to the current crop of coders and hackers. This does not mean that tool was never useful, or still cannot be useful. It just means that progress marches on, and the sorts of problems we have to solve change with the times. We should welcome these changes while remaining sceptical of outrageous claims that they often come with.

Sometimes Forth is still the perfect tool. Sometimes not. The world and the coders in it change, and so do the way they communicate with each-other and what tools they use to get their work done.

We should worry more about getting our code correct, rather than what some other coder is doing with some other language.

I find it interesting that there is significant hang-wringing going on in C newsgroups as C is eclipsed by other tools and languages, and is taught less and less in schools.
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