Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!snorkelwacker!think!ames!pacbell!sactoh0!tree!stever
From: stever@tree.uucp (Steve Rudek)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.forth
Subject: Re: Declining Forth popularity.
Summary: Maybe if FIG unilaterally promoted certain standards...?
Message-ID: <1989Dec18.185612.8335@tree.uucp>
Date: 18 Dec 89 18:56:12 GMT
References: <8912160503.AA25980@jade.berkeley.edu>
Organization: TREE BBS (916)349-0385 Sacramento, Ca
Lines: 98

In article <8912160503.AA25980@jade.berkeley.edu>, wmb@SUN.COM writes:
> > Surely the Forthers of the world could agree on some minimal set of wordsets
> > to implement?  It's kind of like what I understand the ANSI committee is
> > trying to do with the language
> 
> Agreement is a very difficult thing to achieve.  For example, believing
> that memory allocation is important, I convened a working group
...
> I presented the proposal at the October ANSI Forth meeting.  It was
> defeated.  There were violent disagreements in all directions, many of
...
> The process of obtaining agreement on any such issue is a political
> problem, from start to finish.  Politics is hard.  In this arena,

My membership in FIG finally came through, together with current issues of
Forth Dimensions and about $100 worth of disks and manuals (geared toward
F83 and F-PC 3.5  (I'll come back to discuss my first impressions of F-PC
in some other message, since it seems like Tom Zimmer read my thoughts about
improving the functionality of Forth).

Anyway, Brad, I caught your comments about Forth's "minimalist approach",
use of blocks instead of normal files, etc. which were quoted in Forth
Dimensions from a GEnie conference.  Until seeing your comments and taking
a look at F-PC I honestly didn't know that anyone with any sway in the
Forth community would agree with any of my ideas for improving the language.
(Silly guy that I am, I indulged myself in thinking that my comments would
all be considered blashemous to "real" Forth programmers!)

I can imagine your frustration in trying to bring a large number of Forth
vendors plus "old-timer" Forth advocates to a consensus.  I don't know
how many people are on the Ansi committee nor how they are aligned, but 
I'm thinking that if there are more than about 5 people on that committee
then trying to champion an idea through there is going to be nearly
hopeless.  Forth users tend to be an independent bunch, to begin with,
and vendors have a vested interest in keeping their products distinct.   

I'm admittedly an outsider to Forth and FIG, but it seems to me that Forth
has always made its biggest advances when FIG or other small groups of 
individuals basically said "screw it" and went ahead to promote a standard
on their own.  For example, consider Fig-Forth, MVP-Forth, F83 and, now,
F-PC.  The VENDORS have made almost zero contribution to the evolution of
language standards but appear to have been dragged every step of the way.
Laxen and Perry supposedly developed F83 because they didn't trust the
vendors to properly promote that standard.  The "community" would probably
spend the next twenty years fighting over windowing and hypertext
(on-line help) standards so I'm glad that Tom Zimmer, with F-PC, decided
not to consult them.  Too bad there aren't versions of F-PC for the Mac,
Amiga, etc.  THAT would really stir things up! 

I don't know how FIG works or how political things are at the upper
echelon of that organization, but what would be the chances of getting
FIG to officially promote a standard "add-on" wordset for strings,
floating-point, windowing, hypertext help, editor, database, etc?  I
shouldn't be anywhere near the project that the original Fig-Forth was,
though I'd imagine the opposition might be more organized now.  In order
for this to work, there'd have to be sufficient FIG affiliated programmers
to pretty well cover all the major Forth dialects on all the major machines
who would take care of customizing the standard word sets.  Someone would
call and order "Fig-Strings for F83 on a PC", for example.  FIG could 
even pretend it wasn't ignoring Ansi and the vendors in promoting an
independent standard; it could say it was just providing a service to its
members. 

> My fear is that the ANSI Forth standard is "too little, too late".

What's needed is a skunkworks along the lines of GNU and the Free Software
Foundation: an advocacy which actively promoted Forth by providing a
portable set of standards together with great documentation and a few really
INTERESTING, highly polished applications which were portable across
Forths by using Fig extensions.  If Fig would distribute
even one ARCADE QUALITY ADVENTURE GAME, portable across the major brands of
micros through use of Fig extension word sets, they'd score a major
public relations victory.  They would entice a LOT of new programmers to
investigate the language and they would provide a scaffolding upon which
other protable, high quality programs could be built.  (There's a lot
to admire about F83 from a technical standpoint, but for a new programmer
the environment is dull, Dull, DULL!  I can only spend so many hours
playing around with variations on printing bar charts (as taught in 
Starting Forth and K&S Text_and_Reference).  One decent arcade game, on
the other hand, would give me something interesting to tinker with and
explore.  I'm amazed that the Forth community apparently has such a poor
grasp of human psychology as it pertains to motivation and public
relations.  If something isn't done to change that, Forth is going to
go the way of the dinosaurs--just project how far it's fallen from
favor over the last decade and project that to the year 2000.  No, you
don't need to be a mathematician to figure out where Forth is going
to be. 

Can't someone provide me with an FUN application written to run under
F83 (preferably) or even F-PC which will really wow me?  I see that FIG
can provide me with a number of really boring (a.k.a. "advanced math and
Artificial Intelligence") extension wordsets...but not an impressive
(or even an unimpressive) arcade game???  Tell me...if you're a 15 year
old, not yet settled on a favorite programming language, what's there to
excite you and attract you to learn F83?  The answer is "N O T H I N G".  

-- 
{pacbell!sactoh0! OR ucdavis!csusac!}tree!stever