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From: trier@wrangell.scl.cwru.edu (Stephen Trier)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.forth
Subject: Re: Declining Forth popularity.
Keywords: Forth, changes, extensions, marketing
Message-ID: <1989Dec16.012556.14632@usenet.ins.cwru.edu>
Date: 16 Dec 89 01:25:56 GMT
References: <1989Dec14.013516.24694@tree.uucp> <7318@ficc.uu.net>
Reply-To: trier@wrangell.UUCP (Stephen Trier)
Organization: Smith Undergrad Lab, CWRU, Cleve., OH
Lines: 21

I think Peter hit on one of the big reasons for Forth's decline.  When I
got involved in Forth, a 16K Tandy CoCo was a mid-range machine, and Forth
is excellent at being a memory miser.  (My first attempt to implement Forth
was on a CoCo.)  I haven't seen Forth really improve much with the times.
C and BASIC both had more or less "standard" dialects, but Forth left quite
a bit more up to its implementors.

Another fault of many Forths are the throwbacks to the days when Forth was
an operating system, with those terrible 1024-character editing screens.

What we need is a more user-friendly, highly interactive Forth, with sensible
text-editor style editing.  Build some standard libraries for it, and get
everyone to use them.  (How?  I don't know! :-) )  Call it Turbo Forth,
ignoring the fact that Forth's already _fast_, and give it away or sell it.

I know that many Forth systems try to provide some of these features, but very
few of those maintain much cross-compatibility with "standard" Forths.
                  <=> Stephen Trier    seldon!sct@skybridge.SCL.CWRU.Edu
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