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From: RAYBRO%UTRC@utrcgw.utc.COM ("William R Brohinsky", ay)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.forth
Subject: RE: Success of FORTH in the marketplace
Message-ID: <8907201436.AA06532@jade.berkeley.edu>
Date: 20 Jul 89 13:07:00 GMT
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Reply-To: Forth Interest Group International List <FIGI-L%SCFVM.bitnet@jade.berkeley.edu>
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To Landon Dyer's remarks about forth as "it must also be a great toothpaste..."
I must applaud and simultaneously place a restraining metacarpal. First off,
I do not (yet) write things that get sold, certainly not in enough copies to
earn millions of bucks off it. I do write things that I could not write with
out forth, and then maintain them for years, sometimes with four year gaps
in between. I write code I can read and explain to my BASIC-only scientist.
I insist that they be fully documented, which annoys him, since he is used
to writing in TRS-80/Model 100 basic, where multiple-statement lines with
no comments and multiple-statement if-then-elses make code that is terse,
compact, efficient, and totally unreadable. So that particular problem is
not limited to forth (I've seen equally unreadable/maintainable forth, basic,
C, fortran, and perfectly readable programs in Cobol,APL,LISP,and Pascal, or
so I'm told, that I couldn't even begin to read. I think all programmers use
the languages they use because they understand them in a way that is hard to
rationalize...)
Secondly, I must say that in the few months that I have been getting mailings
from the FIG-L and in the years past that I've spent time on the East Coast
Forth Board, I've seen very little of the "it is a great floor wax..." kind
of marketing. Lots of it for Pascal, C, and the newer basics. Mostly, I see
forthers remarking on how good forth is for control applications, how much
easier it is to debug in an interpretive language and how nice it is that
it also compiles so that you can debug at speed, and things like that.
I also (is this a thirdly, or a zerothly?) must agree that there are not
enough educational-system opportunities to assist young programmers in learn-
ing FORTH. What else is new? Forth was invented/developed/grown by one man who
chose to turn the body and embodiment of his fruits over to the public domain.
His reasons for doing it were simple, as he states it. He wanted to write more
code than 100 fully-debugged/maintained lines per year over his lifetime. He
figured that others would, too. But this sort of distribution does not grow
the kind of college-level support that giving product to colleges for reduced
price or free can. (I know of a college whose holography lab uses Data Trans-
lation data acquisition products exclusively, cause they got them near-free,
and now bends experimental method to work within their limitations. It happens,
and will continue to.)

However, if you wish to have formal teaching in one type of forth which has
similar (you almost might say portable) implementations accross many platforms,
try Forth Inc.! They have lots of classes, and their prices are competitive
with C courses I have seen advertised. Their PolyForth implementations are in
the 2 to 5 thousand dollar range, each, though. Hey!--does this qualify as
something written in forth that made a lot of money??

-raybro

Sorry for the long paragraphs and typographic ugliness- this was off the
cuff. I promise to pre-edit my messages in future, unless I forget...