Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!wuarchive!usc!samsung!munnari.oz.au!uhccux!dunn From: dunn@uhccux.uhcc.hawaii.edu (John Dunn) Newsgroups: comp.lang.forth Subject: Re: Forth, Creativity, Snobbishness, and the Future Message-ID: <6047@uhccux.uhcc.hawaii.edu> Date: 6 Jan 90 06:20:24 GMT References: Reply-To: dunn@uhccux.UUCP (John Dunn) Organization: University of Hawaii Lines: 56 Mark Carroll's suggestions for improving Forth, in part by improving the attitude of Forth programmers hit upon three items I would like to address: > So, my suggestions for the Future: > 1> Try and cut the snobbishness. Forth programmers don't have > a corner on creativity. Being good at Forth doesn't make you > a god, so don't act like it! > 2> Let's try to develop some sort of STANDARD ENVIRONMENT! This > 3> Scrap screens! I find that whole screen model to be one of the > most obnoxious, inconvenient, intolerable "features" of Forth! First, if my earlier posting regarding Forth and creativity made me come off as a snobb, I apologize for a bad job of communicating my point. Here is a second try: Forth is the only generally available language I know of that is ideally suited to exploratory programming ("creative" was the word I had used earler) for the real world. There are a few other languages that have the same or even superior interactiveness. Lisp comes to mind as perhaps the best of these. But none that I know of other than Forth allow you to blow the overhead away and deliver a compact, clean application to the end user. Frankly, if Lisp had that ability, I'd prefer it. But as things stand Forth does indeed seem to have a corner on creativity. This is not to belittle compiled languages, however, I stand by my original premis: if you want to write an original application, if you want to try your hand at the software equivalent of writing a novel, Forth encourages - even compels - a creative mindset. And if you do have that creative itch that makes you prefer the insecurity of a novelist's life to the stability of a journalist's, it dosen't make you a god. But it definitely does put you in the minority. Regarding a standard environment: Why is this desirable for Forth? Portability, yes. And even here I wonder if the tradeoffs are worth the price. Maybe we should look at Forth as a language that specifically encourages non-standard non-portable code. Language strongly affects thinking, even bounds it. Perhaps a maverick language that specifically attempts to *unbound* thinking is a good thing to have around. When we need portability and standardization, we have an excellent choice of compiled, authoritarian languages to pick from. The right tool for the right job. Lastly, some comments on the Forth block editor. While the 64 character line limit does tend to discourage comments - not a good thing in any language - the block editor has one critical thing going for it. It allows you to incrementally compile your code right from the editor. An integrated ascii text editor could do that. Most Lisp editors, for example, are smart editors that allow you to compile individual functions. I would applaud such a Forth editor, in fact I'm writing one in my spare time for the LMI UR/Forth that I use. Naturally, I'm using a block editor to write it with. :-) -John Dunn