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From: oster@dewey.soe.berkeley.edu (David Phillip Oster)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.forth
Subject: Re: Forth
Message-ID: <21253@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU>
Date: Mon, 12-Oct-87 20:04:36 EDT
Article-I.D.: ucbvax.21253
Posted: Mon Oct 12 20:04:36 1987
Date-Received: Wed, 14-Oct-87 02:43:59 EDT
References: <5.21698D15@circle.UUCP>
Sender: usenet@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU
Reply-To: oster@dewey.soe.berkeley.edu.UUCP (David Phillip Oster)
Organization: School of Education, UC-Berkeley
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In article <5.21698D15@circle.UUCP> rat@circle.UUCP (David Douthitt) writes:
>I know, but why not tell what you have used Forth for in the past? 

For a previous employer, I have written educational games in Forth that
were published by:

Disney, (Apple ][)
CBS software (Atari 800, Commodore 64)

and a best selling program that teaches typing, that runs on

IBM PC (we had to rewrite it for the XT, jr, and AT were released,
	because IBM kept changing the hardware definition in important ways.)

and

Macintosh (I had to implement my own Forth 83 implementation, because the
	project was early enough that no development systems with reasonable
	license agreements were available.)

I also wrote the cross-compilation system that let us generate the Atari code
on the Apple ][ (that model of atari had disk with a capacity of 90k,
to keep the source code for the project manageble we had to compile on the
Apple.) I wrote the cross-compilation system that let me compile my initial
Mac systems on the IBM.  I wrote the networking code that tied all these
diverse machines together.  I wrote the object-oriented extensions that
were used in some of our advanced projects.

All of this left me with a profound distaste for Forth. In Forth, it is
easy to write a program of hacker quality, or of research quality, or
of for-internal-use quality.  As soon as you try to write a real, commercial
product, that real people are going to use, that fits on the machine and
runs with reasonable performance, you discover that things work fine
for the first 80%, but getting the program actually finished costs you so
much in time and effort that you would have done better to write the whole
thing in a conventional language.  I now use LightSpeed C, with an object
oriented programming methodology I developed, and am roughly 4 to 10 times
as productive as I used to be in Forth.

Can someone out there tell me how I was misusing Forth? What I was doing
wrong? Is there some magic repository of good Forth style and functionality
that makes "Forth Dimensions" magazine and the source for Novix Forth look
like a child's scrawl? (I read both on my way to learning Forth.)

--- David Phillip Oster            --A Sun 3/60 makes a poor Macintosh II.
Arpa: oster@dewey.soe.berkeley.edu --A Macintosh II makes a poor Sun 3/60.
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