Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!ucbvax!SUN.COM!wmb From: wmb@SUN.COM (Mitch Bradley) Newsgroups: comp.lang.forth Subject: Re: Declining Forth popularity. Message-ID: <8912270501.AA01856@jade.berkeley.edu> Date: 22 Dec 89 21:29:48 GMT Sender: daemon@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU Reply-To: Forth Interest Group International List Organization: The Internet Lines: 76 > > It would be extremely difficult to come to agreement in this area, > > consdering the many combattants in the "window system/toolkit war" > This is ridiculous. ... > ?Forth is supposed to be a lean, flexible language, which encourages > reasoned but "proactive" development. This is supposed to make the > development process FASTER. So why is it taking Forth LONGER to reach > any meaningful degree of "standardization" than it's taking other > languages? Aren't Forth programmers supposed to believe in cutting > past the crap and getting things done? Since when does a fast development process help the process of getting human beings to agree on anything? If anything, it makes it worse; Forth development can be so fast that many people can do their own window systems, and once a Forth programmer has written some code, he'll be damned if he is going to throw it away and adopt somebody else's idea of how that problem should be solved. Talk from a theoretical basis all you want; I've been there in person, and I SEEN a different REALITY. Furthermore, Forth programmers are anarchists at heart (otherwise they wouldn't buck the establishment and continue to use Forth despite all the pressure to use C). > And now the plan is to wait another five years until C PROGRAMMERS agree on > the design of a bit mapped windowing standard? It's not C programmers that establish the standard; it's the marketplace. If Forth comes up with its own standard, who will use it? Successful Forth systems for the Macintosh use the Macintosh window system. Successful Forth systems for the Amiga use the Amiga window system. In the Macintosh marketplace, anything that doesn't conform to the Mac user interface is despised. This would be true in the PC marketplace too, if the PC had a user interface standard (one that came bundled with ever PC and which most applications used). > Where do they get Forth 'Standards' teams from, anyway? The ANSI team is composed of people and companies who are willing to put their money and time where their mouths are. By ANSI rules, meetings must be held at various locations. This requires travel. It probably ends up costing about $2000 a year, or more, to travel to all the meetings. Regardless of how you say it "ought" to be, getting a group of opinionated Forth programmers to agree on anything is really, really, hard. Anybody who does not believe me should try to drive the establishment of a standard way of doing something in the Forth community. I started trying to do this for file system interfaces back in 1983, and I have kept at it ever since. (At FORML a couple of years ago, I won an award for "most persistence" based on my continuing efforts in this area). What effect did it have? Very little. The thing that finally drove the ANSI committee to accept a file system interface standard (which is much weaker than the one that I have been proposing all this time) is marketplace pressure. It seems that nearly all vendors, bowing to customer demand, have already added file system interface capabilities. The ANSI version is a "least common denominator" among those vendor's systems. Did anybody choose to adopt my 1983 proposal (which was based upon C "standard I/O" principles and thus a know complete and useable set)? No. No vendors. No implementors of PD or private systems. I published and put in the public domain a high-performance, complete, portable implementation. Why not? Because EVERY FORTH IMPLEMENTOR WANTS TO DO EVERYTHING HIMSELF, FROM SCRATCH. Should it be that way? No. Is it that way? Yes. I have seen this attitude time, and time, and time again. Mitch