Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!csd4.milw.wisc.edu!bionet!apple!landon
From: landon@Apple.COM (Landon Dyer)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.forth
Subject: Success of FORTH in the marketplace
Message-ID: <33300@apple.Apple.COM>
Date: 19 Jul 89 20:31:12 GMT
Organization: Apple Computer Inc., Cupertino, CA
Lines: 53


This is gonna be kind of inflammatory ... you can flame me back, but I've
been down in the coding pits with FORTH afficionados a couple of times, and
it was NOT pretty.  All I can say is, don't take this personally.


| Forth isn't getting creamed in the marketplace because of hardware
| problems.  It's getting creamed because (a) nobody is training
| Forth programmers to any significant extent, and  (b) the lack
| of standardized libraries and usage across different Forth
| implementations causes continuous reinvention of wheels; forward
| progress is slow in the community sense.


I'll sure agree with (a).  I've known half a dozen or so FORTH programmers
who thought they were any good in the language.  Only one of them wrote code
I could read; the rest were so caught-up in language features that they
forgot to write good programs.  Instead they wrote ugly, unmaintainable
things that we generally threw away at the first opportunity, or simply
ignored.


FORTH is also getting creamed in the marketplace because of the snake-oil
attitude of some of its proponents.  The FORTHies I've encountered tend to
push it as totally nifty for doing anything you could imagine.  But they
turn peculiar colors when I've asked them what products they've SOLD.

I'm not bashing FORTH itself here -- I *have* seen some pretty nifty and
responsible applications of the language, but they always involved doing
customized enviroments to handle the very specific requirements of a small
user community.  I think those enviroments were just SUPER and that no
other language would have done the job as effectively, but that does NOT
mean that FORTH will solve everything.


I'd like to see fewer claims along the lines of "It's a great floorwax, so
it must also be a great toothpaste!" and more stories like "I successfully
used FORTH to do an important project X," optionally ending with, "I also
made a million bucks doing it," or "... and thus I saved my company's
bacon."

I'm sick of smug, mindless drivel about nifty language features, the
implication being that other languages (and a lot of damn fine language
people) lack some divine spark and that FORTH is going to take over the
world Real Soon Now.  Right.

So what have YOU successfully used FORTH for?

----
Landon Dyer, Apple Computer, Inc.            "C++ is the FORTH of the 1990s;
Development Systems Group (MPW)               they don't call it 'Uh-oh'
Everything I said here is utter nonsense.     programming for nothing!"