Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!apple!well!jax
From: jax@well.UUCP (Jack J. Woehr)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.forth
Subject: Re: Declining Forth popularity.
Summary: Reports of Decline Greatly Exaggerated
Keywords: jforth, jforth, jforth, jforth, ...
Message-ID: <15140@well.UUCP>
Date: 21 Dec 89 04:28:19 GMT
References: <8912160503.AA25980@jade.berkeley.edu> <1989Dec18.185612.8335@tree.uucp>
Reply-To: jax@well.UUCP (Jack J. Woehr)
Organization: Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link, Sausalito, CA
Lines: 72

In article <1989Dec18.185612.8335@tree.uucp> stever@tree.uucp (Steve Rudek) writes:

	... lots deleted...

>The VENDORS have made almost zero contribution to the evolution of
>language standards but appear to have been dragged every step of the way.

	Not true. Forth, Inc. still sells the best commercially available
multiuser Forth operating system; Harvard Softwarks pioneered full-mem-model
80386 Forth; LMI UR/Forth hopped into the OS/2 market before most software
houses knew a DLL from a dildo; Delta Research maintains what is still
the premiere 68000 Forth, JForth, which incorporates most of your
suggested improvements and much much more, and has done so since 1986.

>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.

	Hypertext is a feature, no-one is going to argue about that
in a Forth system. Neat feature, very helpful, has no more impact
on Forth itself than the color of your keyboard.

>  Too bad there aren't versions of F-PC for the Mac,
>Amiga, etc.  THAT would really stir things up! 
>

	FPC is Tom Zimmer's quite brilliant idea of making a Forth
for the PC/DOS world that runs nearly as well as JForth on the Amiga.
To do so he came up with a very clever way around the "brain-damaged"
Intel architecture. I commend him for that and look forward to the
OS/2 version, but to say that it points the way for the Amiga is
like saying the economy of Romania points the way for Eastern
Europe!

>I'm amazed that the Forth community apparently has such a poor
>grasp of human psychology as it pertains to motivation and public
>relations.


	Forth programmers, as a class, couldn't sell shaved ice in
hell. We are working on it. Image will change.

>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. 

	Forth is in use in more installations than ever before in its
history. It is becoming the premiere embedded control language, which is where
it was born.

	PC programmers have some darn funny ideas. According to EDT,
90% of the computer bux are spent on embedded systems in America,
10% on the type of computer people sit at a desk and use.

>
>Can't someone provide me with an FUN application written to run under
>F83 (preferably) or even F-PC which will really wow me?  

	Sure, buy the Prolog interpreter advertised each month
in FORTH Dimensions magazine.

	Better yet, go visit a friend with an Amiga and see the JForth
demos, or the JGoodies0 disk ...

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{} jax@well.sf.ca.us                                                      {}
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