Re: Small, understandable Forth

Ed wrote: <hhghmd$96q$1@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Josh Grams wrote:
...
Anyway, sorry to be a killjoy. I realize they're free software, and you
get what you pay for and all that. And often none of this is a problem.
You can get a long way with them in spite of their limitations. But
some days... I've dug around inside 15 or 20 Forth systems, and most of
them aren't all that pretty. I keep wondering if I couldn't do better.
Must resist the temptation...

Yes. Those who build their own forth rarely get back to writing apps
or doing anything useful. It may explain why there's such a scarcity
of forth software and yet so many experts :)

Yeah, I was stuck in that phase for three or four years when I first
discovered Forth. I must have put together 7 or 8 toy Forth systems of
various designs, besides digging through the sources of any systems that
I ran across. I still tinker with that sort of thing sometimes. But at
least I don't still try to pretend it's useful. :)

OTOH, there is a niche I'd love to see filled... If I write (for
instance) in Python, I can hand my code to even relatively non-technical
people, and they are usually able to grab Python and the necessary
modules and run my program on whatever computer they have handy. I'm
not aware of any free Forth system that lets me do that reliably and
easily. But it's not important enough to dedicate all my spare time to
it for the couple of years it would probably take. Well, not so far,
anyway. :)

I have gotten to the point where I can throw together Forth scripts to
do one-off tasks pretty comfortably. I have even started using it
occasionally for string-handling tasks which would previously have found
me turning to Perl without a second thought. But it still seems like
any time I try to write any kind of desktop application, I immediately
wind up buried in trivial boilerplate (binding to libraries, figuring
out argument order, re-implementing basic data structures to fit the
application, etc.) and burn out before I get to the interesting bits.

--Josh
.

Relevant Pages

  • Re: Linux and audio pro
    ... I know musicians who piddle around with computers in their ... > You don't know much about free software. ... The first version of Linux ... > was written by a guy piddling about in their spare time. ...
    (comp.os.linux.misc)
  • Re: Linux and audio pro
    ... that doesn't make them professional programmers any ... You don't know much about free software. ... The first version of Linux ... was written by a guy piddling about in their spare time. ...
    (comp.os.linux.misc)
  • Re: Is free software good for developers?
    ... bad, to a more service oriented approach, which free software can help ... This doesn't hurt the people ... tyring to make a living at it. ... Imagine if the guy who used his spare time to work on free software, ...
    (comp.databases.pick)