Of what use do you make of Forth?
John A. Peters
for you besides the normal email, word processing, check writing and
spread sheets?
I would like to know the same about your use of Forth.
Do you have a application coded in Forth or do you like many others
dabble in Forth because it feels like fun? Please expound a bit.
Thank You,
John A. Peters, jape...@pacbell.net I am a F83s and Win32Forth
applications user, specifier, tester, librarian & dreamer. I am a
non-programmer, except as the apprentice 1/2 of a two man team via
VNC. I have more ideas than expertise. The right question is half the
answer, what do you want to know?
Jeff
> I would like to know the same about your use of Forth.
I've used Forth at work for embedded device programming -- sorry, can't
expand on that, though.
On my own, I use Forth to write cross assemblers and toy-language
compilers. I've never used it for a Win32 app, though (at least one
that isn't command line driven).
Jeff
--
Progress in computer technology is waiting for people to stop
re-inventing the wheel.
- Dr. William Bland (comp.lang.lisp)
Paul E. Bennett
For me, the applications are mostly machine controls. My use of Forth is
because it is the easiest programming environment for me to express the
problem domain and solution space.
--
********************************************************************
Paul E. Bennett ....................<email://peb@a...>
Forth based HIDECS Consultancy .....<http://www.amleth.demon.co.uk/>
Mob: +44 (0)7811-639972 .........NOW AVAILABLE:- HIDECS COURSE......
Tel: +44 (0)1235-811095 .... see http://www.feabhas.com for details.
Going Forth Safely ..... EBA. www.electric-boat-association.org.uk..
********************************************************************
John Doty
> Do you have a application coded in Forth or do you like many others
> dabble in Forth because it feels like fun? Please expound a bit.
I have used Forth for many years for controlling and testing scientific
instruments. An example would be the ASCA Silicon Imaging Spectrometer:
http://heasarc.gsfc.nasa.gov/docs/asca/asca_sis.html
I set up the test station for this instrument in Forth.
The Forth language I used for this was LSE, a simplified dialect
descended from STOIC. I have recently reimplemented this for modern
hardware. I am now using my LSE64 on Linux as a development tool for
advanced x-ray imagers.
-jpd
Alex Gibson
"John A. Peters" <jape...@pacbell.net> wrote in message
news:64d13f62.04092...@posting.google.com...
> Sometimes I ask a business acquaintance "What does your computer do
> for you besides the normal email, word processing, check writing and
> spread sheets?
>
> I would like to know the same about your use of Forth.
>
> Do you have a application coded in Forth or do you like many others
> dabble in Forth because it feels like fun? Please expound a bit.
>
> Thank You,
>
For it for embedded control and robotics apps.
Use some of the newmicros www.newmicros.com products.
Also use picforth a little.
Stefan Schmiedl
John A. Peters <jape...@pacbell.net> wrote:
>
> Do you have a application coded in Forth or do you like many others
> dabble in Forth because it feels like fun? Please expound a bit.
>
I'm writing a set of small Windows applications for a client.
They are data entry front ends for a MySQL database. The main
reason for choosing Forth was it's simple syntax, lack of
arcane incantations, speed and compactness of executable code
and the ability to cover the whole software spectrum between
twiddling bits and implementing abstract concepts.
If you're interested in some of the details, check out the
upcoming issue(s) of the German Forth magazine "Vierte Dimension".
kind regards,
s.
Hans Bezemer
> Sometimes I ask a business acquaintance "What does your computer do
> for you besides the normal email, word processing, check writing and
> spread sheets?
>
> I would like to know the same about your use of Forth.
(using my own compiler). Most are utilities and tools for development
or conversion. And of course an occasional game.
Michael L Gassanenko
> for you besides the normal email, word processing, check writing and
> spread sheets?
>
> I would like to know the same about your use of Forth.
As a computer scientist, I used Forth for experiments with
programming language syntax and semantics. Forth was chosen
because it has no syntax checker to be circumvented, because
of easyness of [threaded] code generation, and because of
access to the return stack. (And all this by high-level means!)
As a programmer, I used Forth
a) for implementing cross-assemblers and cross-compilers for Forth
(because there was a demand)
b) as a language for programming the stack processor TF-16
(stack processor = Forth processor, one of the cheapest/simplest
processor architectures)
If you want to know of a Win32 application example, go to
http://www.eserv.ru/ -- Eserv is written in Forth (namely, SP-Forth),
not sure about their other products.
Eserv is a news/www/ftp/proxy server. They used to have both English and
Russian pages, but somewhy I see only Russian pages now.
http://www.serverwatch.com/stypes/servers/article.php/16161_1436321
Ian Yellowley
we use FORTH for embedded control..motion and process. Some CNC
and more recently reconfigurable systems for X by wire systems.
See...
http://www.cimotion.com/index_files/eCAF_tech.htm
for a (non available right now) prototype. We have used Swiftforth and
IForth recently on pc hosts, the above protoype uses a port of pfe to
ecos..and has a Python based interface. Most of the work is done in the
product development Lab at UBC..Cameleon controls is a spin off company.
regards
Ian
Zouplaz
> and the ability to cover the whole software spectrum between
> twiddling bits and implementing abstract concepts.
What do you mean by "Implementing abstract concepts" ?
Julian V. Noble
I use it to write quick programs to compute things. Primarily number-crunching
applications. Sometimes to test ideas that are hard to implement in C or
Fortran.
Finally, when I was still teaching I used it as my in-class demo language
for illustrating ideas in a computational methods course. I could write
and debug a working program intelligibly, working in front of the class
on a projection screen. If something went wrong I could easily find out
what, so it was good for teaching students to test and analyze their
programs. I don't think there is any other language--well, maybe Lisp--
that would have permitted this directness. I have not heard of anyone
here doing CS 101 (where they teach C and C++) in front of their classes.
They don't dare--too many opportunities for embarrassment.
--
Julian V. Noble
Professor Emeritus of Physics
j...@lessspamformother.virginia.edu
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
http://galileo.phys.virginia.edu/~jvn/
"For there was never yet philosopher that could endure the toothache
patiently." -- Wm. Shakespeare, Much Ado about Nothing. Act v. Sc. 1.
don groves
> On 26 Sep 2004 10:43:57 -0700,
> John A. Peters <jape...@pacbell.net> wrote:
> >
> > Do you have a application coded in Forth or do you like many others
> > dabble in Forth because it feels like fun? Please expound a bit.
> >
>
> I'm writing a set of small Windows applications for a client.
> They are data entry front ends for a MySQL database. The main
> reason for choosing Forth was it's simple syntax, lack of
> arcane incantations, speed and compactness of executable code
> and the ability to cover the whole software spectrum between
> twiddling bits and implementing abstract concepts.
<lack of arcane incantations>
There are many who would say Forth *is* an arcane incantation!
Not me, of course.
--
dg (domain=ccwebster)
Doug Hoffman
jape...@pacbell.net (John A. Peters) wrote:
3 ways:
1) Business - At work I often need to help crunch data, either raw
output from dataloggers or data from a database. People come to me when
they can't get their "canned" database software to get things just
right. With Forth it is so easy. They think I'm really smart to do it
and do it so quickly, but that's not the case. Forth just makes me look
good.
2) Hobby - I have written and released into the public domain an airfoil
plotting program intended for use on model planes. It has been used
around the world with good success. It's called J-Foil, runs on
Macintoshes, and can be found lots of places if you do a Google search.
3) Pleasure - I find writing programs to solve specific problems like
interfacing a Forth to Mac OSX routines (List Manager, Popup menus,
etc.) to be relaxing and enjoyable. My version of working a crossword
puzzle, I guess.
Regards,
-Doug
JES
news:64d13f62.04092...@posting.google.com...
> Sometimes I ask a business acquaintance "What does your computer do
> for you besides the normal email, word processing, check writing and
> spread sheets?
>
> I would like to know the same about your use of Forth.
>
I use Forth for developing small low-power high-speed data acquisition and
control systems for basic research in underwater acoustics, u/w bio-sonar,
and behavior research. Forth's development efficiency and application
flexibility allows sparce basic research dollars to be stretched to
accomplish what would otherwise be prohibitively expensive goals.
John E. Sigurdson
Stefan Schmiedl
the final words in the forth source code are one kind
of abstract concept: they describe what's going on as
opposed to how it's going to be done.
If you want, you can go all the way to OO land, which is
abstraction in another direction.
Everything's possible, almost nothing hidden, very often
things are simpler than expected. Right now I'm replacing
a XML-based configuration file used for generating parts
of a website with a much simpler Forth-based solution.
s.
Stefan Schmiedl
1. At least it's a short incantation.
2. I was referring to stuff like Java's constructor chant:
Whatever whatever = new Whatever();
and similar things ...
> Not me, of course.
I have a company name card with the title "Director of Arcane Studies"
lying around here somewhere. ;>
s.
Stefan Schmiedl
Doug Hoffman <dhof...@journey.com> wrote:
>
> 3) Pleasure - I find writing programs to solve specific problems like
> interfacing a Forth to Mac OSX routines (List Manager, Popup menus,
> etc.) to be relaxing and enjoyable. My version of working a crossword
> puzzle, I guess.
>
Thanks for putting this into words.
Now I make much more sense to myself :-)
s.
Gary Chanson
"Stefan Schmiedl" <s...@xss.de> wrote in message
news:2rsfjkF...@uni-berlin.de...
The name of my web site is Arcane Incantations and that name dates back
to when I ran a BBS many years ago. ;)
--
-GJC [MS Windows SDK MVP]
-Software Consultant (Embedded systems and Real Time Controls)
- http://www.mvps.org/ArcaneIncantations/consulting.htm
-gcha...@mvps.org
Krishna Myneni
> I would like to know the same about your use of Forth.
> ...
Like many of the other responses here, I use Forth mainly
for instrument control and data acquisition [ using kForth
for these apps of course :) ]. I also now use iForth for
running some number crunching apps for science simulations
related to my research. I believe all of my research publications
( http://ccreweb.org/ccre/kmpubs.html ) have made use of
Forth, either for acquiring the data, reducing it (i.e.
curve fitting or other analysis), or modeling the systems.
Also, like Doug Hoffman, it serves as a mental diversion
from my other activities.
Krishna Myneni
Guy Macon
Programming toys for Mattel.
Elizabeth D Rather
news:10ljvoq...@news.supernews.com...
>
> Programming toys for Mattel.
>
That's so cool! Can you tell us what Mattel toys are programmed in Forth?
Cheers,
Elizabeth
--
==================================================
Elizabeth D. Rather (US & Canada) 800-55-FORTH
FORTH Inc. +1 310-491-3356
5155 W. Rosecrans Ave. #1018 Fax: +1 310-978-9454
Hawthorne, CA 90250
http://www.forth.com
"Forth-based products and Services for real-time
applications since 1973."
==================================================
Peter Lawrence
>
> Sometimes I ask a business acquaintance "What does your computer do
> for you besides the normal email, word processing, check writing and
> spread sheets?
>
> I would like to know the same about your use of Forth.
>
> Do you have a application coded in Forth or do you like many others
> dabble in Forth because it feels like fun? Please expound a bit.
These days, apart from fun (mainly from lurking, not coding), I use it for a
configurable alarm clock application and to guide me in my occasional
research towards Furphy (some Furphy stuff is at
http://member.netlink.com.au/~peterl/furphy.html).
In the dim and distant past, I used it as a work around to provide what I
needed when office political reasons required me to use IBM 370 assembler
instead of something suitable. For the same reasons, I had to implement it
within the macros rather than getting out of assembler into a Forth
environment as soon as I had built enough for that. I found out about Forth
from researching tools to work around the political constraints I had been
given; if I hadn't been learning as I went I would have implemented something
far more efficient. PML.
--
GST+NPT=JOBS
I.e., a Goods and Services Tax (or almost any other broad based production
tax), with a Negative Payroll Tax, promotes employment.
See http://member.netlink.com.au/~peterl/publicns.html#AFRLET2 and the other
items on that page for some reasons why.
John A. Peters
----- Original Message -----
From: "Peter Lawrence" <pet...@netlink.com.au>
> John A. Peters wrote:
> >
> > Sometimes I ask a business acquaintance "What does your computer do
> > for you besides the normal email, word processing, check writing and
> > spread sheets?
> >
> > I would like to know the same about your use of Forth.
> >
> > Do you have a application coded in Forth or do you like many others
> > dabble in Forth because it feels like fun? Please expound a bit.
>
> These days, apart from fun (mainly from lurking, not coding), I use it for
a
> configurable alarm clock application
How the heck does that work?
Configure to do what?
It sounds interesting.
Is the code somewhat ANS standard?
jp
Guy Macon
Elizabeth D Rather <era...@forth.com> says...
>That's so cool! Can you tell us what Mattel toys are programmed in Forth?
Alas, I can't. You might be a Hasbro spy... :) (Seriously, though,
one might read my words, and I don't reveal my employer's secrets)
I can say this much; a variant of Forth was created to avoid having
to do every toy in assembly, productivity went up at least 10X,
everyone who was using Forth technology was laid off, the two
engineers who spearheaded the effort (one of them was me) have
formed a new company that uses a Forth-like language for embedded
systems, we are at the pilot run stage right now, and all will be
revealed right here when we start taking orders and shipping product.
Sorry I can't say more at the moment.
Graham Smith
Peters <jape...@pacbell.net> writes
>Sometimes I ask a business acquaintance "What does your computer do
>for you besides the normal email, word processing, check writing and
>spread sheets?
>
>I would like to know the same about your use of Forth.
>
>Do you have a application coded in Forth
1) Our specialised data capture device is programmed in Forth (MPE
cross compiler)
2) An application running "scripts" to display images on screen and to
show buttons which 'open documents'. Used by non-technical colleague to
create a front end to new "Demo CD". (VFX Forth for Windows)
3) Various mini-apps using VFX Forth for Windows:
a) password generator - allowing privileged access to our
commercial offerings.
b) File searcher which includes a text searcher ('cos Windows
doesn't do it).
c) Simple text editor.
d) Interface program to our data capture device.
.....
A future project (a specialised database) may be written in Forth.
Discussions are taking place now ...
>or do you like many others
>dabble in Forth because it feels like fun? Please expound a bit.
It IS fun. Often!
Graham Smith
--
E-mail: Remove X's and underscores from X_gra...@tectime.com
Jeff Fox
> That's so cool! Can you tell us what Mattel toys are programmed in Forth?
Guy has given some details before in comp.arch.embedded. I thought it
was very cool stuff long before he ever mentioned that the programming
was done in Forth. I often felt that he was decribing the right way,
the way that things should be done, and I was impressed by lots of
the details of various projects.
There are a lot of hobbyist type users in comp.arch.embedded and
I often saw very advice and experiences from these more casual embedded
systems programmers and Mr. Macon's clearly more professional
advice and experiences. I even wrote him that he was one of the
sane voices in comp.arch.embedded. I told him that I enjoyed his
posts and found them very educational.
Then I found out that he used Forth and I lost all respect for him. ;-)
Best Wishes,
P.S. I really like his comments about the trance-state conjecture.
Steve Graham
Steve Graham
===
Guy Macon
Steve Graham <js.g...@comcast.net> says...
>
>Why were the Forth technologists all laid off?
Empire building. The department head is compensated according to
how many people he has working for him. Thus, to him, having
everyone do everything in Assembly with crude tools and no code
re-use is profitable, and having someone who finishes a toy in
1/10 of the time using a Forth-like language takes money out of
his pocket.
I saw the same thing in the hardware area. Every new engineer is
told to design a low-cost audio amplifier as if Mattel had never
made a talking toy before. Same uP. Same speaker. New amplifier.
Peter Lawrence
>
> John A. Peters wrote:
> >
> > Sometimes I ask a business acquaintance "What does your computer do
> > for you besides the normal email, word processing, check writing and
> > spread sheets?
> >
> > I would like to know the same about your use of Forth.
> >
> > Do you have a application coded in Forth or do you like many others
> > dabble in Forth because it feels like fun? Please expound a bit.
>
> These days, apart from fun (mainly from lurking, not coding), I use it for a
> configurable alarm clock application and to guide me in my occasional
> research towards Furphy (some Furphy stuff is at
> http://member.netlink.com.au/~peterl/furphy.html).
Strange. Google groups show a follow up query to this post, but it doesn't
show up on my newsreader. So I'll post it in reply to myself and cc it to the
person who asked.
I originally wrote an alarm clock in Foxplus, with a simple screen to accept
the alarm time. Then I upgraded it so I could wake up to watch late night TV
and still get a morning alarm. Then I realised I could use something more
flexible, so I wrote some FPC Forth that let me set almost any desired
combination that suited me, just using the Forth command line. (I also put
together a few batch files that let me run things straight from the DOS
command line too.) It also let me play with things like Zeller's congruence -
no Y2K trouble for me. It's really alpha release stuff, with features that
would count as bugs for anyone who doesn't know them, and I didn't provide a
manual since it wasn't for a broader market. Naturally efficiency isn't a
priority when you are trying to loop for delay purposes.
Anyhow, for wider public interest, here's the source, still running on FPC
but as you can see with variants to try out TCOM. PML.
( this source file will eventually implement a clock - 14.10.93 )
( one assumption in the following words is that they pass control )
( from each to the next in very short periods of time, so time delays )
( set up by one word are still approximately correct when its )
( successor starts up )
: FGT ; ( to have a place to forget to )
FORTH
DEFINED TARGET-INIT NIP #IF
TARGET
: MAIN NO-ESC SETRC DR-WHO BYE ;
: MYBEEP 7 EMIT 7 EMIT 7 EMIT 7 EMIT ( each equivalent to 900 1 TONE ) ;
( MAIN only compiled when using TCOM or similar )
#ELSE
: MYBEEP 900 2 TONE 450 2 TONE ;
#THEN
DECIMAL
: MOD24 ( HH --- HH ) 24 MOD ;
: AST-TO-GMT ( HH --- HH ) 10 - MOD24 ;
: GMT-TO-AST ( HH --- HH ) 10 + MOD24 ;
VARIABLE CLOCKROW
VARIABLE CLOCKCOL
: SETRC ( --- ) AT? CLOCKROW ! CLOCKCOL ! ;
SETRC ( defaults to wherever it was )
: CST CR SETRC ; ( to abbreviate a common combination )
( the following is from a Zeller's congruence article in DDJ, April 1995 )
: REM ( n1 n2 --- n3 ) /MOD SWAP DROP ;
: YYADJUST ( yyyy --- adjust ) ( works out the offset for the year )
DUP 4 REM SWAP
DUP 400 REM SWAP
DUP 100 REM
- + + ;
: MMADJUST ( mm --- adjust ) ( works out the offset for the month )
DUP 1 + 3 *
5 REM
SWAP DUP + + ;
: WEEKDAYNO ( dd mm yyyy --- daynum )
OVER 3 <
IF
SWAP 12 + SWAP 1 -
THEN ( adjusted for months either side of possible leap days )
YYADJUST
SWAP MMADJUST
+ + 7 MOD
DUP 6 = ( Sunday )
IF
DROP 1
ELSE
2 +
THEN
;
( the preceding is from a Zeller's congruence article in DDJ, April 1995 )
: .WEEKDAY ( daynum --- )
CASE
1 OF
." Sunday"
ENDOF
2 OF
." Monday"
ENDOF
3 OF
." Tuesday"
ENDOF
4 OF
." Wednesday"
ENDOF
5 OF
." Thursday"
ENDOF
6 OF
." Friday"
ENDOF
7 OF
." Saturday"
ENDOF
ENDCASE ;
: .MTHNAME ( monthnum --- )
CASE
1 OF
." January"
ENDOF
2 OF
." February"
ENDOF
3 OF
." March"
ENDOF
4 OF
." April"
ENDOF
5 OF
." May"
ENDOF
6 OF
." June"
ENDOF
7 OF
." July"
ENDOF
8 OF
." August"
ENDOF
9 OF
." September"
ENDOF
10 OF
." October"
ENDOF
11 OF
." November"
ENDOF
12 OF
." December"
ENDOF
ENDCASE ;
: .NN ( n --- ) (.) TYPE ; ( like . without the trailing space )
: .NN2 ( nn --- ) 0 <# # # #> TYPE ;
( prints 2 digit numbers with leading zeroes )
: .NNTH ( dd --- )
DUP .NN
DUP 10 REM
1 =
IF
DROP ." th"
ELSE
10 MOD
CASE
1 OF
." st"
ENDOF
2 OF
." nd"
ENDOF
3 OF
." rd"
ENDOF
DROP ." th"
ENDCASE
THEN ;
: .YYYY ( yyyy --- ) DUP 0>
IF
. ." AD"
ELSE
1 - . ." BC"
THEN ;
: .BRDATETXT ( yyyy mm dd --- ) ." the " .NNTH ." of " .MTHNAME ." , "
.YYYY ;
: .OLDBRDATETXT ( yyyy mm dd --- ) 2 .R ." /" 2 .R ." /" . ;
: .BRITDATE ( --- ) GETDATE SPLIT SWAP ( --- yyyy mm dd )
DUP 2 PICK ( --- yyyy mm dd dd mm )
4 PICK
WEEKDAYNO .WEEKDAY ." "
.BRDATETXT
." "
( to blank out any text left over from other dates ) ;
VARIABLE GOT-ESC ( used to hold whether Esc was pressed before )
: NO-ESC ( --- ) FALSE GOT-ESC ! ; ( simple reset )
NO-ESC ( the Esc key is assumed not to be pressed initially )
: ESC-NOW ( --- T/F ) KEY? IF KEY 27 = ELSE FALSE THEN ;
: CHECK-ESC ( --- T/F ) ESC-NOW GOT-ESC @ OR DUP GOT-ESC ! ;
: NON-ESC-BYE ( --- ) CHECK-ESC NOT IF BYE THEN ;
: .HRSMINSSECS ( SS MM HH --- ) .NN ." :" .NN2 ." :" ( hours and minutes )
SPLIT
.NN2 ." ." .NN2 ( seconds and fractions ) ;
: .NEWTIME
( stands in for .TIME to let TCOM work )
GETTIME SWAP
SPLIT ( break open the hhmm to be able to tell a.m./p.m. )
CASE
0 OF
12 .HRSMINSSECS ." a.m."
ENDOF
12 OF
12 .HRSMINSSECS ." p.m."
ENDOF
DUP 12 >
IF
12 - .HRSMINSSECS ." p.m."
ELSE
.HRSMINSSECS ." a.m."
THEN
ENDCASE ;
: CLOCK-DETS ( --- ) CLOCKCOL @ CLOCKROW @ AT
.NEWTIME ." , " .BRITDATE ;
: HHMMWAIT ( HH MM --- ) SWAP 256 * +
BEGIN
CLOCK-DETS
GETTIME
DROP OVER >=
CHECK-ESC OR
UNTIL
DROP ;
: DDMMWAIT ( DD MM --- ) 256 * +
BEGIN
CLOCK-DETS
GETDATE
SWAP DROP OVER >=
CHECK-ESC OR
UNTIL
DROP ;
: YYYYWAIT ( YYYY --- ) BEGIN
CLOCK-DETS
GETDATE
DROP OVER >=
CHECK-ESC OR
UNTIL
DROP ;
: DDMMYYYYWAIT ( DD MM YYYY --- ) YYYYWAIT DDMMWAIT ;
: DDMMYYWAIT ( DD MM YY --- ) 1900 + DDMMYYYYWAIT ;
: NBEEPS ( N --- ) 0 ?DO
CHECK-ESC
IF
LEAVE
THEN
MYBEEP
CLOCK-DETS
LOOP ;
: EVERBEEP ( --- ) BEGIN
CHECK-ESC NOT
WHILE
MYBEEP
CLOCK-DETS
REPEAT ;
: CLOCK ( --- ) BEGIN
CHECK-ESC NOT
WHILE
CLOCK-DETS
REPEAT ;
: ONLYHOURS ( --- HH ) GETTIME
DROP ( drop seconds and hundredths )
SPLIT
SWAP DROP ( drop minutes ) ;
: HHWAIT ( HH --- ) BEGIN
CLOCK-DETS
ONLYHOURS
OVER =
CHECK-ESC OR
UNTIL
DROP ;
: NOWHHMM ( --- HH MM ) GETTIME DROP SPLIT SWAP ;
: ADDMINS ( N HH MM --- HH MM ) ROT + 60 /MOD ROT + MOD24 SWAP ;
: WAITMINS ( N --- ) NOWHHMM ADDMINS OVER HHWAIT HHMMWAIT ;
: BLNK CLS SETRC ;
: BP20 20 NBEEPS ;
: BP50 50 NBEEPS ;
: HHMMBP20 ( HH MM --- ) OVER HHWAIT HHMMWAIT BP20 CST ;
: HHMMBP50 ( HH MM --- ) OVER HHWAIT HHMMWAIT BP50 CST ;
: HHMMBP50X2 ( HH MM --- ) OVER HHWAIT HHMMWAIT BP50 5 WAITMINS BP50 CST ;
: NECLOCK CLOCK NO-ESC ;
: RICE CST 10 WAITMINS BP20 CST 15 WAITMINS BP20 ; ( timer for cooking rice )
: DR-WHO ( specialised for Dr. Who time ) 4 HHWAIT
4 34 HHMMWAIT
125 NBEEPS ;
: STD-ALARM HHMMBP50X2 20 WAITMINS EVERBEEP BYE ;
: MORN 6 45 STD-ALARM ;
Valery Kondakoff
news:64d13f62.04092...@posting.google.com:
> Do you have a application coded in Forth or do you like many others
> dabble in Forth because it feels like fun? Please expound a bit.
There is a program, written in Forth (SP-Forth), called nnCron. This is
Windows scheduler and full-blown automation manager. Using this program
one can automate most of Windows routine tasks using plain Forth.
Take a look at nnCron web-site ( http://www.nncron.ru/ ) or at online
nnCron docs ( http://www.nncron.ru/help/help.htm ). I'm pretty sure,
nnCron is one of the most popular schedulers/automation managers here in
Russia, so there are many users, who use Forth on a daily basis.
nnCron (read: Forth) mail-list, web-forum and newsgroup are available.
I hope you will find this info useful.
--
Best regards,
Valery Kondakoff
np: Radiohead - You (Pablo Honey)
Jeff Fox
> Steve Graham <js.g...@comcast.net> says...
> >
> >Why were the Forth technologists all laid off?
>
> Empire building.
Also described as power shifting in the trance-state
conjecture. Every project involves some shift in power.
> The department head is compensated according to
> how many people he has working for him. Thus, to him, having
> everyone do everything in Assembly with crude tools and no code
> re-use is profitable, and having someone who finishes a toy in
> 1/10 of the time using a Forth-like language takes money out of
> his pocket.
This is exactly what I have seen in numerous circumstances
except substitute and army of 500 C or Java programmers. The
very idea that a smaller team of Forth programmers can do
the job faster and cheaper calls many corporate decisions
into question. It also implies that somebody is going to
be demoted from general with 500 troops in his army to
a lower level in the command chain because a smaller army
will be needed. This shift in corporate power explains
why many managers hate the idea of using Forth.
What drives them the craziest are the reports that there are
alternatives that offer a 10x improvement in productivity.
We must remember that that corresponds to a 10x reduction
in rank for somebody who is now in a power position. It
also invoves risk that people who are making money doing
what they are doing are not inclined to take.
You will also find non-Forth programmers who will simply
never accept anyone's 10x observations or measurements and
will simply dismiss them as anecdotal evidence and lament
that there are not scientific studies being done at the
Universities to compare Forth to C. (Unfortunately the
only things of that type tend to set out to prove that
a Forth written in C will not produce more efficient
code than C would have in the first place.)
You will also find programmers in other languages, or non-
programmers, who will never accept any amount of 'anecdotal'
evidence no matter how many people report a 10x change
in productivity. Since they cannot bring themselves to
fairly consider the ideas and will dismiss them out of
hand with statements like, "This 10x thing cannot be true,
if it were true Forth would have taken over the programming
world." But of course this completely denies the existence
of factors like the problems with shift in power that come
when staffs and budgets and salaries are involved.
Many people's jobs are completely dependent on a companies
policies of using particular methods no matter how obsolete
or inefficient. The people who get layed off or demoted
because of improved productivity of a smaller workforce,
automation, or whatever, will tend to see the less efficient
practices that require their contribution as absolutely
essential. This is one of the ways that much of the industry
depends on the engineered inefficiency and planned obsolecence
in consumer computing today.
> I saw the same thing in the hardware area. Every new engineer is
> told to design a low-cost audio amplifier as if Mattel had never
> made a talking toy before. Same uP. Same speaker. New amplifier.
Yes. Other people have reported similar things. Bernd gave an example
of a company rejecting a more efficient hardware design for their part
because the less efficient hardware gave them a higher profit margin
on the part. Hardware efficiency, software efficiency, or the degree
of productivity that a product offers are often not as important as
who gets paid and how much. Inefficient methods and big budgets
are seen as a good thing as long as people get paid.
I thought the issue of power shifting was one of the interesting
points about the real but often unspoken and unrecognized issues
in hardware of software development described in the trance-state
conjecture article at your web site. The other important issues
were the pressure to underestimate time and effort and the
way they never seem to learn from experience.
Best Wishes,
Jeff Fox
"Math is hard!" Talking Barbie
Bernd Paysan
> Empire building. The department head is compensated according to
> how many people he has working for him. Thus, to him, having
> everyone do everything in Assembly with crude tools and no code
> re-use is profitable, and having someone who finishes a toy in
> 1/10 of the time using a Forth-like language takes money out of
> his pocket.
Isn't that a standard Dilbert thing? Jeff Fox told us the same about
Packard Bell, the place where Scott Adams worked before making Dilbert
comics became his full-time job. The open question is: How can
companies survive such a scheme when there might be competitors who
don't?
--
Bernd Paysan
"If you want it done right, you have to do it yourself"
http://www.jwdt.com/~paysan/
Guy Macon
Bernd Paysan <bernd....@gmx.de> says...
>
>Guy Macon <http://www.guymacon.com> wrote:
>
>> Empire building. The department head is compensated according to
>> how many people he has working for him. Thus, to him, having
>> everyone do everything in Assembly with crude tools and no code
>> re-use is profitable, and having someone who finishes a toy in
>> 1/10 of the time using a Forth-like language takes money out of
>> his pocket.
>
>Isn't that a standard Dilbert thing? Jeff Fox told us the same about
>Packard Bell, the place where Scott Adams worked before making Dilbert
>comics became his full-time job. The open question is: How can
>companies survive such a scheme when there might be competitors who
>don't?
In the long run, they don't. In the short run, there is a
huge brand loyalty for Barbie(tm) and Hot Wheels(tm), and
those non-electronic toys make enough profit to carry
failure after failure in the area of electronic toys.
Julian V. Noble
>
> Guy Macon <http://www.guymacon.com> wrote:
> > Empire building. The department head is compensated according to
> > how many people he has working for him. Thus, to him, having
> > everyone do everything in Assembly with crude tools and no code
> > re-use is profitable, and having someone who finishes a toy in
> > 1/10 of the time using a Forth-like language takes money out of
> > his pocket.
>
> Isn't that a standard Dilbert thing? Jeff Fox told us the same about
> Packard Bell, the place where Scott Adams worked before making Dilbert
> comics became his full-time job. The open question is: How can
> companies survive such a scheme when there might be competitors who
> don't?
>
That's an easy question to answer. You should read GB Shaw, "Back to
Methusaleh". Let us say corporation A--perhaps one with a $ in its name ;-)
--has grown past a certain critical size (I don't know what that is) using
a certain methodology, before something new emerges that is cheaper, more
profitable, etc.
Now there are two possibilities:
1. Corporation A has developed or can acquire the new method.
2. Startup Corporation B uses the new method to compete with A.
In Case 1, it may be to Corporation A's advantage to suppress the invention.
For example, startup costs and uncertainties may defer the additional
profits to the point that, on the basis of internal rate of return, the
staus quo is actually preferable, or at least no worse.
In case 2, Bernd's question, A may still be able to effectively suppress the
new method by squeezing B in various ways. For example, A may be in a position
to deny financing to B by threatening loss of business topotential lenders.
GM and Ford did this to Lear when the latter was trying to deploy an efficient
external combustion engine. Alternatively, A may be able to promulgate
damaging rumors about B's products, thereby deterring buyers. GM did this
to the Stanley Steamer. Finally, A may create hidden incompatibilities with
B's product. IBM did this until stopped by the FTC under anti-trust legislation.
Microsoft did this to DR DOS, Geoworks Ensemble, and other competing products.
They simply would not run under Windows.
The richer party can also subvert the legal system through bribery. I suspect
this is what happened when Lotus 1-2-3 put (Forth-based) VP Planner out of
business on the basis of duplicated "look and feel" (aka user interface),
since "look-and-feel" had never previously been held to be a protected aspect of
products. And many circuits of the Federal Courts still do not recognize
"look-and-feel" as copyrightable.
Although several of these tactics are strictly illegal, in a climate of lax
government enforcement it might take years for the courts to hear the case,
by which time corrective measures would be too late: B would by out of
business.
In probability theory these are examples of "Gambler's Ruin" problems. (They
represent one of the great weaknesses of capitalist theory.) With equal
contestants, the party with more resources prevails. Even if one
has an advantage, a sufficient initial disparity of resources can
overwhelm it. This is why a worldwide cataclysm was needed to end the
hegemony of dinosaurs and allow the rise of the mammals.
Elizabeth D Rather
news:4fbeeb5a.04093...@posting.google.com...
. ...
> This is exactly what I have seen in numerous circumstances
> except substitute and army of 500 C or Java programmers. The
> very idea that a smaller team of Forth programmers can do
> the job faster and cheaper calls many corporate decisions
> into question. It also implies that somebody is going to
> be demoted from general with 500 troops in his army to
> a lower level in the command chain because a smaller army
> will be needed. This shift in corporate power explains
> why many managers hate the idea of using Forth.
>
> What drives them the craziest are the reports that there are
> alternatives that offer a 10x improvement in productivity.
> We must remember that that corresponds to a 10x reduction
> in rank for somebody who is now in a power position. It
> also invoves risk that people who are making money doing
> what they are doing are not inclined to take.
This reminds me of something that happened to Chuck and me in the very, very
early days of FORTH, Inc,, about 1974. Some folks in a division of a large
company in Ohio called and said they had a project involving a Nova
computer, taking & displaying data. They had been unable to get it done in
the several months' they had been working on it using Data General's
Fortran, etc., because of problems writing drivers for the data acquisition
device and plotter. They asked us to prove that Forth could do it. So we
went there, and promised to get it running in 3 days.
Now, although we had run Forth on Novas just fine, this one had a new disk
we hadn't seen (remember, this is a totally native Forth, no OS whatever,
all bare metal). So the first day we spent keying in a disk driver and
bootstrapping Forth in via paper tape and console switches. Painful. But
after that, things went swimmingly, and the second day we wrote the driver
for the data acquisition system and plotter, and on the third day
demonstrated the program to about 20 people (managers, programmers, etc.).
Everyone was very congratulatory and said we'd be hearing from them.
Two weeks later I phoned to follow up, and was told that the whole
programming staff had been sacked, including their manager who had called us
in, because we had demonstrated that they were incompetant. And, of course,
since we had proved the problem was trivial, they had no intention of hiring
us, they were going to get a new batch of programmers and start over.
> You will also find non-Forth programmers who will simply
> never accept anyone's 10x observations or measurements and
> will simply dismiss them as anecdotal evidence and lament
> that there are not scientific studies being done at the
> Universities to compare Forth to C. (Unfortunately the
> only things of that type tend to set out to prove that
> a Forth written in C will not produce more efficient
> code than C would have in the first place.)
I have offered many times to support any independent researcher attempting
to study either productivity or code efficiency by supplying software, names
of customers (with their consent, of course), or any other assistance. The
offer is still open... It really is a shame and a disservice to the
industry that no one has looked into this claim seriously.
Gary Chanson
"Bernd Paysan" <bernd....@gmx.de> wrote in message
news:allt22-...@cohen.paysan.nom...
> Guy Macon <http://www.guymacon.com> wrote:
> > Empire building. The department head is compensated according to
> > how many people he has working for him. Thus, to him, having
> > everyone do everything in Assembly with crude tools and no code
> > re-use is profitable, and having someone who finishes a toy in
> > 1/10 of the time using a Forth-like language takes money out of
> > his pocket.
>
> Isn't that a standard Dilbert thing? Jeff Fox told us the same about
> Packard Bell, the place where Scott Adams worked before making Dilbert
> comics became his full-time job. The open question is: How can
> companies survive such a scheme when there might be competitors who
> don't?
Note that Packard Smell didn't survive. ;)
Ed Beroset
> "Bernd Paysan" <bernd....@gmx.de> wrote in message
> news:allt22-...@cohen.paysan.nom...
>
>>Guy Macon <http://www.guymacon.com> wrote:
>>
>>>Empire building. The department head is compensated according to
>>>how many people he has working for him. Thus, to him, having
>>>everyone do everything in Assembly with crude tools and no code
>>>re-use is profitable, and having someone who finishes a toy in
>>>1/10 of the time using a Forth-like language takes money out of
>>>his pocket.
>>
>>Isn't that a standard Dilbert thing? Jeff Fox told us the same about
>>Packard Bell, the place where Scott Adams worked before making Dilbert
>>comics became his full-time job. The open question is: How can
>>companies survive such a scheme when there might be competitors who
>>don't?
>
>
> Note that Packard Smell didn't survive. ;)
True, but Scott Adams worked for Pacific Bell, not Packard Bell.
Pacific Bell lives on as SBC Communications, Inc.
Ed
Ed
Gary Chanson
"Ed Beroset" <ber...@mindspring.com> wrote in message
news:x1Y6d.8326$Ki1....@newsread2.news.atl.earthlink.net...
I thought there was something strange there!
Bernd Paysan
> Two weeks later I phoned to follow up, and was told that the whole
> programming staff had been sacked, including their manager who had
> called us
> in, because we had demonstrated that they were incompetant. And, of
> course, since we had proved the problem was trivial, they had no
> intention of hiring us, they were going to get a new batch of
> programmers and start over.
Seems to prove that you really have to wear some sort of pointy hat if
you do some kind of "magic". This doesn't work with two humble people
like you and Chuck. I've seen some highly regarded people who look like
real weirdos, and make a show, and when they do their amazing things,
customers rarely think they can just hire a bunch of new programmers to
replace them. Probably those higher-manager then think "they are real
weirdos, I would not dare to hire such a person who wears ragged
shorts, beard, long hair, a funny hat, but no tie, and walks on bare
feet, but they solve my problem in a short time, charge an incredible
amount of money, and then I don't have to face these horrible creatures
again until it breaks".
John A. Peters
> They asked us to prove that Forth could do it. So we
> went there, and promised to get it running in 3 days.
What if you told them it would take 3x10 or 30 days and that they
could not watch your programmers? Tell them they only have to pay a
non refundable retainer fee equal to 3 days of work.
Think up some reason that they could not watch you work, like it is
"not patented yet" or it is a "trade secret" both of which are or
could be true.
With hind sight can you think of a business plan that would make the
above work? There are always more than one version of the truth. I
am not suggesting that you lie or deceive, but I am challenging the
group here to find a way to enclose or wrap a Forth project in an
envelope of respectability and dependability in a way that will not
cause the managers to loose stature and income.
You might be able to offer to sell them a faster result than 30 days
for a premium price or offer to contract the project for a lower price
if they allow you more than 30 days.
In other words we need to be more astute in our business dealings, and
structure our deals to match the goals of the business client, not
just get the job done.
>
> Now, although we had run Forth on Novas just fine, this one had a new disk
> we hadn't seen (remember, this is a totally native Forth, no OS whatever,
> all bare metal). So the first day we spent keying in a disk driver and
> bootstrapping Forth in via paper tape and console switches. Painful. But
> after that, things went swimmingly, and the second day we wrote the driver
> for the data acquisition system and plotter, and on the third day
> demonstrated the program to about 20 people (managers, programmers, etc.).
> Everyone was very congratulatory and said we'd be hearing from them.
>
> Two weeks later I phoned to follow up, and was told that the whole
> programming staff had been sacked, including their manager who had called us
> in, because we had demonstrated that they were incompetant. And, of course,
> since we had proved the problem was trivial, they had no intention of hiring
> us, they were going to get a new batch of programmers and start over.
We have seen this scenario before. I am going t start a new thread
where hope others will respond with examples of how they have
succeeded in dressing up Forth to be an acceptable product, other than
a secret weapon
John A. Peters
Stephen Pelc
<era...@forth.com> wrote:
>This reminds me of something that happened to Chuck and me in the very, very
>early days of FORTH, Inc,, about 1974.
[entertaining story snipped]
We had a similar experience in th early 80s when a previous
employer had been debugging a complex piece of hardware with
the usual collection of scopes, in-circuit emulators and so
on for several months. I offered a Forth in EPROM for their
CPU, and found the problem in an hour or two with a scope
probe and interactive debugging. They grunted "thanks" and
were never heard of again.
Never forget the influence of fashion on software.
Stephen
--
Stephen Pelc, steph...@INVALID.mpeltd.demon.co.uk
MicroProcessor Engineering Ltd - More Real, Less Time
133 Hill Lane, Southampton SO15 5AF, England
tel: +44 (0)23 8063 1441, fax: +44 (0)23 8033 9691
web: http://www.mpeltd.demon.co.uk - free VFX Forth downloads
Stephen Pelc
<j...@virginia.edu> wrote:
>The richer party can also subvert the legal system through bribery. I suspect
>this is what happened when Lotus 1-2-3 put (Forth-based) VP Planner out of
>business on the basis of duplicated "look and feel" (aka user interface),
>since "look-and-feel" had never previously been held to be a protected aspect of
>products. And many circuits of the Federal Courts still do not recognize
>"look-and-feel" as copyrightable.
According to a source very close to that case, either VP-Planner
or the publisher (I forget which) had insurance. The insurers
decided it was cheaper to pay up rather to face the legal battle.
Elizabeth D Rather
news:64d13f62.0409...@posting.google.com...
> ...
> With hind sight can you think of a business plan that would make the
> above work? There are always more than one version of the truth. I
> am not suggesting that you lie or deceive, but I am challenging the
> group here to find a way to enclose or wrap a Forth project in an
> envelope of respectability and dependability in a way that will not
> cause the managers to loose stature and income.
>
> You might be able to offer to sell them a faster result than 30 days
> for a premium price or offer to contract the project for a lower price
> if they allow you more than 30 days.
>
> In other words we need to be more astute in our business dealings, and
> structure our deals to match the goals of the business client, not
> just get the job done.
The real obstacle is the perception that all languages are equivalent, as
are all programmers. That is demonstrably untrue, but most "experts" swear
that it is true.
We charge above-average hourly rates, but consistently save our customers
significant amounts of money on the cost of the project, because we can
bring it in in a small number of hours (of course, this is a double win for
them, because they get a shorter time-to-market as well). Our customers
appreciate this, and come back to us time and again. However, in
conversations with new potential customers, we hear them saying that they
can "go out on the street" and find a C programmer who charges half as much
per hour, and why shouldn't they do it that way? Where possible, we try to
bid in terms of project cost rather than hourly fee, but many projects
aren't sufficiently specified to do it that way.
Paul E. Bennett
> "Elizabeth D Rather" <era...@forth.com> wrote
> Snip
>> They asked us to prove that Forth could do it. So we
>> went there, and promised to get it running in 3 days.
>
> What if you told them it would take 3x10 or 30 days and that they
> could not watch your programmers? Tell them they only have to pay a
> non refundable retainer fee equal to 3 days of work.
{%X]
> With hind sight can you think of a business plan that would make the
> above work? There are always more than one version of the truth. I
> am not suggesting that you lie or deceive, but I am challenging the
> group here to find a way to enclose or wrap a Forth project in an
> envelope of respectability and dependability in a way that will not
> cause the managers to loose stature and income.
I usually find that it is easier to sell a Forth based project when you
handle the hardware and software aspects as a whole solution approach. The
client want to achieve objective X (specified as what their users want to
happen), you produce the whole gizmo and deliver. You may mention the Forth
basis or you may decide not to. Of course, it takes some time to develop
the bespoke hardware but the software solution can often be ready when the
first hardware arrives on the doorstep. In High Integrity systems you will
also have a great deal of paperwork to do as well.
> In other words we need to be more astute in our business dealings, and
> structure our deals to match the goals of the business client, not
> just get the job done.
Asking that sort of question of your customer requires subtlety at times.
--
********************************************************************
Paul E. Bennett ....................<email://peb@a...>
Forth based HIDECS Consultancy .....<http://www.amleth.demon.co.uk/>
Mob: +44 (0)7811-639972 .........NOW AVAILABLE:- HIDECS COURSE......
Tel: +44 (0)1235-811095 .... see http://www.feabhas.com for details.
Going Forth Safely ..... EBA. www.electric-boat-association.org.uk..
********************************************************************
Howerd Oakford
I am currently porting the colorForth Editor from Pentium assembler to
colorForth.
I am doing this because it is fun!
I have also written/modified/adapted several mini applications for
colorForth : a simple game called "slime", "sound" which plays part of
Handel's Gavotte on your PC's speaker, "wood" which creates an imitation
pine block-board background etc...
Regards
Howerd 8^)
"John A. Peters" <jape...@pacbell.net> wrote in message
news:64d13f62.04092...@posting.google.com...
> Sometimes I ask a business acquaintance "What does your computer do
> for you besides the normal email, word processing, check writing and
> spread sheets?
>
> I would like to know the same about your use of Forth.
>
> Do you have a application coded in Forth or do you like many others
> dabble in Forth because it feels like fun? Please expound a bit.
>
> Thank You,
>
> John A. Peters, jape...@pacbell.net I am a F83s and Win32Forth
> applications user, specifier, tester, librarian & dreamer. I am a
> non-programmer, except as the apprentice 1/2 of a two man team via
> VNC. I have more ideas than expertise. The right question is half the
> answer, what do you want to know?
til...@yahoo.com
wrote:
>Sometimes I ask a business acquaintance "What does your computer do
>for you besides the normal email, word processing, check writing and
>spread sheets?
>
>I would like to know the same about your use of Forth.
>
>Do you have a application coded in Forth or do you like many others
>dabble in Forth because it feels like fun? Please expound a bit.
>
>Thank You,
>
>John A. Peters, jape...@pacbell.net I am a F83s and Win32Forth
>applications user, specifier, tester, librarian & dreamer. I am a
>non-programmer, except as the apprentice 1/2 of a two man team via
>VNC. I have more ideas than expertise. The right question is half the
>answer, what do you want to know?
My current usage of Forth is as a scripting language for Delphi
applications. Delphi has an extensive suite of components and
makes it possible for a developer to build his own components.
So I've developed a Forth that takes the form of a component
that can be dropped into an application and used "out-of-the-box"
by writing a minimum amount of initialization code. It's extremely
handy as a testing and debugging tool and as a means of providing
a simple command language for an application.
There's more information about ,my project at
http://www.creoleforth.org.
don groves
gcha...@No.Spam.TheWorld.net wrote...
>
> "Bernd Paysan" <bernd....@gmx.de> wrote in message
> news:allt22-...@cohen.paysan.nom...
> > Guy Macon <http://www.guymacon.com> wrote:
> > > Empire building. The department head is compensated according to
> > > how many people he has working for him. Thus, to him, having
> > > everyone do everything in Assembly with crude tools and no code
> > > re-use is profitable, and having someone who finishes a toy in
> > > 1/10 of the time using a Forth-like language takes money out of
> > > his pocket.
> >
> > Isn't that a standard Dilbert thing? Jeff Fox told us the same about
> > Packard Bell, the place where Scott Adams worked before making Dilbert
> > comics became his full-time job. The open question is: How can
> > companies survive such a scheme when there might be competitors who
> > don't?
>
> Note that Packard Smell didn't survive. ;)
No, but Pacific Bell (now part of Southwest Bell) does and that
is where Dilbert originated.
--
dg (domain=ccwebster)
don groves
steph...@INVALID.mpeltd.demon.co.uk wrote...
> On Thu, 30 Sep 2004 13:02:05 -0400, "Julian V. Noble"
> <j...@virginia.edu> wrote:
>
> >The richer party can also subvert the legal system through bribery. I suspect
> >this is what happened when Lotus 1-2-3 put (Forth-based) VP Planner out of
> >business on the basis of duplicated "look and feel" (aka user interface),
> >since "look-and-feel" had never previously been held to be a protected aspect of
> >products. And many circuits of the Federal Courts still do not recognize
> >"look-and-feel" as copyrightable.
>
> According to a source very close to that case, either VP-Planner
> or the publisher (I forget which) had insurance. The insurers
> decided it was cheaper to pay up rather to face the legal battle.
There was another early application of a Forth dialect (STOIC, I
believe). Epson had an early PC that ran an office-like system
called Valdocs. It was horribly slow but that wasn't a Forth
problem, it was due to trying to do a full office app on a Z80.
--
dg (domain=ccwebster)
Steve Graham
documentation for an app I had developed. Great little system. I
rented use on it at the local library. I think that it had a couple of
CPU's. I read a writeup on the development of Valdocs and I believe
that it was created on a distributed basis, and it even survived being
rehosted on a brand new version of Forth.
Steve Graham
===
John A. Peters
----- Original Message -----
From: "Steve Graham" <js.g...@comcast.net>
Newsgroups: comp.lang.forth
To: <comp.la...@ada-france.org>
Sent: Saturday, October 02, 2004 10:21 PM
Subject: [personal] Re: Of what use do you make of Forth?
> In the 1983-1986 timeframe, I used the Epson QX-10 (I think) to do the
> documentation for an app I had developed. Great little system. I
> rented use on it at the local library. I think that it had a couple of
> CPU's. I read a writeup on the development of Valdocs and I believe
> that it was created on a distributed basis, and it even survived being
> rehosted on a brand new version of Forth.
>
>
> Steve Graham
It would be neat to have a copy of the source code to see if it could be
updated.
Any one got a copy?
JaP
don groves
france.org>, jape...@pacbell.net wrote...
Valdocs was written at a company called Rising Star Industries by
Chris Rutkowski, et al. I couldn't find anything recent on
Google.
--
dg (domain=ccwebster)
Guy Macon
Andrew Nicholson <and...@lesto.com> says...
> - failure to sell?
> - failure to generate profit?
> - failure of engineering?
>If it's the last; is it process related or implementation?
All of the above:
Failure to sell:
The fact of the matter is, nobody has the slightest clue as to
which toys will be big sellers or duds. All you can do is guess,
make a bunch of different toys, and be prepared to shift into
high-volume production if you have a hit.
Failure to generate profit:
Always related to failure to sell. The toy industry has this part
down to a science: if it sells, it generates a profit.
Failure of engineering?
Sometimes you just can't get the cost low enough, and the project
is cancelled. Or you can't get the design done in time with the
amount of resources you have. Or your chip has a bug (Masked ROM,
minimum order 50,000 chips...) and there isn't enough time to fix
it and order new chips. (These bugs, BTW, are often not the fault
of the programmer. These are the cheapest possible chips using the
worst possible quality control, and sometimes a chunk of ROM is
bad. Or maybe one instruction doesn't work. Or any numbe5r of other
things - you accept a certain failure rate in order to get the lowest
cost).
And, of course, you have engineering failures caused by mismanagement.
m-coughlin
>
> Guy Macon <http://www.guymacon.com> wrote:
> > Empire building. The department head is compensated
> > according to how many people he has working for him.
> > Thus, to him, having everyone do everything in Assembly
> > with crude tools and no code re-use is profitable, and
> > having someone who finishes a toy in 1/10 of the time
> > using a Forth-like language takes money out of
> > his pocket.
>
> Isn't that a standard Dilbert thing? Jeff Fox told us the same
> about Packard Bell, the place where Scott Adams worked before
> making Dilbert comics became his full-time job. The open
> question is: How can companies survive such a scheme when there
> might be competitors who don't?
Its Pacific Bell, not Packard Bell. These are two entirely
different companies, with different management requirements, and
it makes a big difference. Pacific Bell was formerly a part of
the main American Telephone company (AT&T), which was split into
several parts after there was a political government decision
that a very large government regulated monopoly telephone system
was not a good idea. Packard Bell is (or was) a series of
smaller companies that manufactured and sold electronic consumer
goods such as television sets and computers. Pacific Bell had
layers of managers who had to follow detailed company regulation
handbooks with all the unintended consequences of such
regulations. Companies, such as AT&T or Pacific Bell, cannot
compete in the computer business with smaller companies, such as
Dell, because of the mistakes made by managers engaged in empire
building and forced to follow rigid procedures. It is
interesting to see how small companies, when successful, turn
into big companies that have the same problems as Pacific Bell.
But I think a more important question is why some small
company with competent management has not used the ten times
improvement in productivity of Forth to turn into a bigger company.
--
Michael Coughlin m-cou...@comcast.net Cambridge, MA USA
Stefan Schmiedl
m-coughlin <m-cou...@comcast.net> wrote:
> It is
> interesting to see how small companies, when successful, turn
> into big companies that have the same problems as Pacific Bell.
>
> But I think a more important question is why some small
> company with competent management has not used the ten times
> improvement in productivity of Forth to turn into a bigger company.
>
Several ideas come to mind:
Maybe Forth programmers are more in the mindset of craftsmen (vs. mass
production)?
A bigger company almost always has different targets than smaller
companies, which have different requirements.
It's not easy to find competent Forth programmers to increase the
company's manpower.
So even if you're 10x more productive in Forth than in other languages,
there is a limit to what you can do, which keeps you safely in the
"small company" area.
s.
Peter Lawrence
Similarly it would be interesting to have the source code for VPP, the Lotus
123 clone that was mentioned elsewhere on this thread. Likewise it would be
interesting to have the Forth it was written in, kforth (not the kforth that
Krishna Myneni is currently working on). It allowed the clone some extra
functionality, background printing and calculation as I recollect.
Oddly enough, some ten years ago, when I was doing an MBA, the computer
unit's lecturer commented about programming languages in current use. When I
added Forth to the list he offered, he said it wasn't in use any more. Only,
the university had issued us with licensed copies of VPP that the legal
settlement was allowing end users to grandfather out, and I was able to tell
him that there was still a fair amount of Forth hidden out of sight. I still
have my backup copy of VPP around, so I suppose with enough reverse
engineering I could get the VPP source and maybe even kforth itself, or at
any rate insights into them. PML.
--
GST+NPT=JOBS
I.e., a Goods and Services Tax (or almost any other broad based production
tax), with a Negative Payroll Tax, promotes employment.
See http://member.netlink.com.au/~peterl/publicns.html#AFRLET2 and the other
items on that page for some reasons why.
Jeff Fox
> But I think a more important question is why some small
> company with competent management has not used the ten times
> improvement in productivity of Forth to turn into a bigger company.
As usual your question is simply nonsense. It has happened many
times. Sometimes the company grows to dominate its niche because
of Forth. Sometimes the suits turn it into C after it has
produced a large enough company with enough suits. And almost
always you will look the other way and ask why it never happens.
Many of Mike's questions can be answered simply by saying,
"Your question is based on a false assumption."
Best Wishes
m-coughlin
What is the false assumption? That Forth can not be used for
a ten times improvement in productivity? I'll stand by my
statement. If you think it is nonsense, then that just shows
what a big problem we have. There has never been a company that
got big because it could use the advantage that Forth provides.
There have been many small companies that used Forth, and they
have stayed small, or gone out of business. What are you
thinking of with the word "suits"? Is there some rule that a
Forth programmer can't be a businessman (or businesswoman), and
make enough profits so they should wear a suit? Adobe Systems
Inc. grew from nothing selling a product that resembles Forth.
Its worth $12,000,000,000 on the stock market today. What keeps
somebody else from doing the same with real Forth?
Brad Eckert
> m-coughlin <m-cou...@comcast.net> wrote in message news:<4162DD4E...@comcast.net>...
> > But I think a more important question is why some small
> > company with competent management has not used the ten times
> > improvement in productivity of Forth to turn into a bigger company.
>
> As usual your question is simply nonsense. It has happened many
> times. Sometimes the company grows to dominate its niche because
> of Forth. Sometimes the suits turn it into C after it has
> produced a large enough company with enough suits. And almost
> always you will look the other way and ask why it never happens.
It seems Forth doesn't fit well with the typical business model. You
generally have to grow your own Forth programmers instead of
recruiting them.
This is where risk aversion comes into play. Here is the downside of
Forth, from the suits' point of view:
1. There is no loyalty these days. The Forther could leave, which
would cause a serious lapse in code maintainability.
2. It costs time and money to train a new Forther.
Those are just the facts. Then there are perceptions such as Forth
being a dead language, etc. If you have a large C code base, train a C
programmer to use Forth and C in the same project. Forth can perform a
supervisory role in mixed language projects to shorten development
time.
Forth is really the ideal language for a large company. They have
enough resources to handle their own risk management. In other words,
to grow and maintain a pool of Forth programmers. They can do more
projects in less time using Forth.
Of course, human nature is to play it safe. You won't get fired for
using prevailing methods.
Brad
Jeff Fox
> What is the false assumption?
In that case the false assumption was 'we don't see'
when other people have seen it, reported it, explained it,
and discussed it in places like this newsgroup until they
wear out their fingers. Because of the increased productivity
in Forth there is a history of companies that have used it
carve out market niches etc. Yet, you will always come back
and ask, 'why don't we see ...' when '...' is experienced,
seen, noted, written about, documented, and discussed by
other people all the time. Replace the word 'we' with 'I'
and the answer is because you have have a very selective
vision. Using the word 'we' and asking why 'we' don't
see ... when 'we' do see ... is the false assumption that
the question is based on.
Why don't we see the sun rises in the East every day?
That is an example of a question based on a false assumption,
'we' do see that the sun rises in the East every day
because the Earth spins.
> That Forth can not be used for
> a ten times improvement in productivity?
No.
> I'll stand by my
> statement. If you think it is nonsense, then that just shows
> what a big problem we have.
'We' have a problem with your vision.
> There has never been a company that
> got big because it could use the advantage that Forth provides.
That's the sort of false assumption that is implied in your
questions. It is wrong. Maybe you are just defining 'big' as
'bigger than microsoft' or something like that.
I say gaining over 80% of a market in a niche qualified as
getting big to me. I guess it comes down to a question of how
you define big. No Forth system has 'taken over the world'
either as you have previously claimed that they should if they
really do provide the improved productivity claimed. Another
case of forming a question based on a false assumption.
> There have been many small companies that used Forth, and they
> have stayed small, or gone out of business. What are you
I guess small/large is a value judgment as is how much profit
constitutes success.
> thinking of with the word "suits"? Is there some rule that a
The word suits was used with the Dragon Dictacte example. That
was one that shot down many of your false assumptions but you
never addressed it. After the improved productivity of Forth
provided a winning product that grew the company and brought
in the suits the common wisdom was switch to using C in a real
business.
> Forth programmer can't be a businessman (or businesswoman), and
> make enough profits so they should wear a suit?
Er, I think you missed my point and are going off in an odd direction
asking questions that have no relation to what I was talking about.
I was talking about how Forth is good for productivity, and that
suits usually prefer more conservative tool use, and mandate C.
I don't see how you go from that to asking if programmers who can't
make money programming should start wearing suits?
> Adobe Systems
> Inc. grew from nothing selling a product that resembles Forth.
> Its worth $12,000,000,000 on the stock market today. What keeps
> somebody else from doing the same with real Forth?
That one is easy. They already did it. Copying them won't make
money, they have patents and/or copyrights and have already
established a well defended niche.
You missed my point. Forth sometimes enables new and useful
products that users like. They products make money and eventually
Forth is replaced by C. The suits do what they get taught in school
and it isn't usually taking risks like using unconventional tools.
Your last question is another example of a non-sequator based on
a false assumption. People are out there making money with Forth
every day. Nothing is preventing them from doing this. Since
there are people out there making products using Forth and making
money using Forth the answer is, once again, your question is
just plain wrong. It is based on a false assumption. It is a
clever way to repeatedly present these false assumptions as if
they were facts.
Jeff Fox
> It seems Forth doesn't fit well with the typical business model. You
> generally have to grow your own Forth programmers instead of
> recruiting them.
Many people have made considerable effort to get Forth to fit
into more business models. There are many associated problems as
everyone knows. Its probably not a good subject to bring up.
> This is where risk aversion comes into play. Here is the downside of
> Forth, from the suits' point of view:
>
> 1. There is no loyalty these days. The Forther could leave, which
> would cause a serious lapse in code maintainability.
Yes. But well written code should not lock you into a primadona
programmer's control. But there are fewer Forth programmers and
so in general more less skilled workers are often seen as an
easier thing to deal with than fewer more skilled workers. But
that may also be a common managment error.
> 2. It costs time and money to train a new Forther.
Yes. But it should be negligable unless you are trying to train
people who have never programmed to become new Forth programmers.
One of the experiences that I recall from iTV was training new
programmers in two hours. That is a completely negligable factor.
> Those are just the facts.
Those are facts in the sense that it is a fact that people
think that way. It is a fact that management often makes those
false assumptions so it is true that everyone has to deal with it.
> Then there are perceptions such as Forth
> being a dead language, etc.
Yes. More of the same as above. The facts are, people do think
this. They hear it all the time. Even someone visiting c.l.f
for the first time is likely to encounter such statements and
not is a list of common misconceptions about Forth.
> Of course, human nature is to play it safe. You won't get fired for
> using prevailing methods.
It has been said in this newsgroup that coming in ahead of schedule
and under budget is just as big an error as coming in behind schedule
and over budget. It is an error in either case because it shows up
poorly done schedules and estimates although in the later case there
are other negative consequences. Still the former may really be a
bigger problem in a company because of the disruption that it can
cause.
Avoiding that sort of disruption is often seen in management as an
important form of risk management, the risk that trying something
different might actually work better. There are risks associated
with it failing, and other risks associated with it working. All
those risks can be avoided by sticking to the path of conservative
wisdom. If it's not broken why fix it? And after all these things
are all relative not absolute, one language is really only efficient
or inefficient in comarison to another.
Best Wishes
m-coughlin
> m-coughlin <m-cou...@comcast.net> wrote in message news:<41641405...@comcast.net>...
[snip]
> The word suits was used with the Dragon Dictacte example. That
> was one that shot down many of your false assumptions but you
> never addressed it. After the improved productivity of Forth
> provided a winning product that grew the company and brought
> in the suits the common wisdom was switch to using C in a real
> business.
What is the "Dragon Dictate" example? How is it connected to Forth?
[snip]
m-coughlin
>
> m-coughlin <m-cou...@comcast.net> wrote in message news:<41641405...@comcast.net>...
[snip]
> Your last question is another example of a non-sequator based on
> a false assumption. People are out there making money with
> Forth every day. Nothing is preventing them from doing this.
> Since there are people out there making products using Forth
> and making money using Forth the answer is, once again, your
> question is just plain wrong. It is based on a false
> assumption. It is a clever way to repeatedly present these
> false assumptions as if they were facts.
To make a long story short, I think our disagreement might be
summarized as follows. Forth is a billion dollar idea
($1,000,000,000). Since there are no Forth programmers who have
made a billion dollars, I am very dissapointed and am unhappy to
have use programs written by the billion dollar software
companies, usually in C. You, on the other hand, seem to be
satisfied with much less financial success. I think Forth is a
nice hobby. But even if someone made $1,000,000 using Forth, I'd
still think they were using it as a hobby and not using it at
its full potential.
I hope that somebody will get their act together and use
Forth effectively, if not to become very rich, at least to get
more programmers to stop asking "Forth, what's that?" As you
say, "Nothing is preventing them from doing this", to which I
would add, all it takes is some good common sense.
Bernd Paysan
>> 2. It costs time and money to train a new Forther.
>
> Yes. But it should be negligable unless you are trying to train
> people who have never programmed to become new Forth programmers.
> One of the experiences that I recall from iTV was training new
> programmers in two hours. That is a completely negligable factor.
Two hours? That sounds a bit too short. It might be sufficient to give
the trainee the basic philosophy and things to get started with
self-training; but he won't be productive after 2 hours.
Note that many commercial settings use complex programs where the user
also needs training (and if it is self-training) to get productive,
either. You have to account for that, you can't normally assume that a
new hire will work with 100% efficiency from day one. Except when the
new hire brings all the tools he needs already with him, like a Forth
programmer ;-).
Jeff Fox
> I think Forth is a
> nice hobby. But even if someone made $1,000,000 using Forth, I'd
> still think they were using it as a hobby and not using it at
> its full potential.
I should realize that you are either nuts or just trooling.
I mean really. How many programmers, in any language, have
become billionaires as programmers? There are an awful lot
of ... programmers out there and few get struck by lightning
or win a lottery.
If making billions is your main plan going at it through
becomming a programmer seems like a rather silly idea. Mike,
has the ivy completely covered the windows on the ivory tower
to give you such a totally obscured view of the world?
I'll give you the benefit of the doubt and assume that you
are just trooling and not just nuts.
> I hope that somebody will get their act together and use
> Forth effectively,
I won't ask what using Forth effectively means to you, I have
the impression that it has something to do with taking over
the world again.
> if not to become very rich, at least to get
> more programmers to stop asking "Forth, what's that?"
I do cringe at the thought of someone asking that question
in your presence. I have heard before how you see that as
an opportunity to jerk their chain and feed them your favorite
illusions about Forth.
Bernd Paysan
> To make a long story short, I think our disagreement might be
> summarized as follows. Forth is a billion dollar idea
> ($1,000,000,000). Since there are no Forth programmers who have
> made a billion dollars, I am very dissapointed and am unhappy to
> have use programs written by the billion dollar software
> companies, usually in C.
Forth is not a billion dollar idea. It's a damn'd programming language,
and programming languages are tools for programmers. PostScript is
different, while it seems to be a programming language, it actually is
a page description language, and the value lies in that it creates a
printer infrastructure. The programming language part apparently seems
to be "accidently", and Adobe dropped most of it in PDF. While PDF
still resembles PostScript, it is no longer a programming language.
Note that the currently most popular language, Java, was indirectly an
outcome of PostScript and Forth. James Gosling originally had the task
to write a C to PostScript Compiler, so that C programmers had an
easier job to program PostScript. Or rather NeWS. NeWS was then
replaced with X, and Mitch Bradley created OpenBoot. Inspired by that,
Gosling thought that he could combine the conventional C program style
with a Forth-like VM, and created Java, without realizing what Forth
really is (or PostScript).
He's just trapped into the C way of thinking, and can't get out. The
original target of Java (Oak) was embedded systems; as the team
proceeded, they where ways too large and to slow, so they created a web
browser with applets as demo. That made Jave the "applet language", and
riding on the .com wave, it became popular. It's now a "servlet
language", i.e. executed on servers, where at least the cross-platform
aspect is not needed.
As long as too many people are trapped into the C (or Fortran) way of
programming, Forth can't be a wide success. And don't count on managers
- managers make uninformed decisions, based on popularity. Why do you
think so many highly technical companies standardize on Word as
document processor? Because Word is any good? No, it's just anybody
else is doing it, too, except the universities and scientific journals.
And because these managers obviously must have bought their diploma
from a spammer, because otherwise, they would know about LaTeX, too (or
are they just too old?).
Elizabeth D Rather
news:4fbeeb5a.04100...@posting.google.com...
> > 2. It costs time and money to train a new Forther.
>
> Yes. But it should be negligable unless you are trying to train
> people who have never programmed to become new Forth programmers.
> One of the experiences that I recall from iTV was training new
> programmers in two hours. That is a completely negligable factor.
Hmmm, it seems to me you've also told us what wretched Forth code these iTV
programmers produced. Might there be a connection with that and only 2 hrs
of training? In my experience 3 days' full-time work is a bare minimum for
folks to "get" the idea of using the stack effectively, and 5 days to get a
basic working skill-set. The concepts of Forth are, indeed, simple -- heck,
the basic principles can be given in two or three sentences, but the
"attitude adjustment" and development of a working vocabulary takes longer.
Of course, your basic course in C in college is ~11-13 weeks, I'm told. In
comparison, 5 days to learn Forth still seems pretty negligable
John A. Peters
(Jeff Fox) wrote
> I should realize that you are either nuts or just trolling.
> I mean really.
<snip>
JP=CAREFUL (neither one is flattering)
(Flattery will get you everywhere)
> I'll give you the benefit of the doubt and assume that you
> are just trolling and not just nuts.
<snip>
JP=CAREFUL (actually kind of funny)
> I do cringe at the thought of someone asking that question
> in your presence. I have heard before how you see that as
> an opportunity to jerk their chain and feed them your favorite
> illusions about Forth.
<snip>
JP=CAREFUL (R rated language)
Hi Jeff,
I enjoy reading what you type (you prolific guy)
I realize what you say may be true but why grind your teeth
and generate sparks from your keyboard? You could start a
flame by mistake or misunderstanding. . .
JaP
P.S. I am proud to have started this topic
(and then ran away),
but I do hope we can keep it on the upside.
John A. Peters
Jeff Fox
Hi John,
In case you hadn't noticed I had stopped responding to your
posts because I found them too offensive. You start lots of
flame threads that you should know will go nowhere except
to cause confusion and problems for people then you run away
to watch the dogfights that follow.
Worse yet you come back and lecture people about manners
after insulting them. This is why I quit responding to
your 'advice.'
> JP=CAREFUL (neither one is flattering)
> (Flattery will get you everywhere)
Flattery does not get you everywhere. Sometimes it takes
something to actually get people's attention. When someone
starts a flamewar and then runs away to enjoy what follows
or insults you and then gives you advice about being polite
you sometimes need something other than flattery to get
their attention.
> JP=CAREFUL (actually kind of funny)
Careful?
> > I do cringe at the thought of someone asking that question
> > in your presence. I have heard before how you see that as
> > an opportunity to jerk their chain and feed them your favorite
> > illusions about Forth.
> <snip>
> JP=CAREFUL (R rated language)
R rated language? I don't see any R rated language. What the
hell are you talking about? Do you need R rated language to
get your attention?
> Hi Jeff,
>
> I enjoy reading what you type (you prolific guy)
I have not enjoyed reading your posts for quite a few months.
They make me cringe. I often wonder why you repeated restart
flame thread and then run away. What's up with that? You have
a strange sense of what is entertaining.
> I realize what you say may be true but why grind your teeth
> and generate sparks from your keyboard? You could start a
> flame by mistake or misunderstanding. . .
Occasionally people do get offended by simple statements that
they take personally. If I complain about stupid people some
people will assume that I must be talking about them. If I
complain about intentional waste some people will insist
that I have indited them personally. But in general I complain
about those things without identifying individuals and if
certain individuals assume that any discussion of stupidity or
intentional waste must be about them I don't see it as my fault.
As someone who seems to delight in starting flames then running
away why should you be concerned about anyone else starting
flames either intentionally or not? You are not the only
person who has the right to flame others in c.l.f John.
I really wish you wouldn't start all the flame threads. I also
think it is kind of cowardly for you to start them then run
away, as you say. I think it is very hypocritical of you
to do this regularly and then to lecture people about not
starting flames or about being polite.
Perhaps a thread about your behavior in c.l.f is called for.
Do you want a critique of your behavior here? In short I
would ask, 'What the hell are you thinking?" or maybe more
simply "Are you thinking?"
> JaP
>
> P.S. I am proud to have started this topic
> (and then ran away),
Exactly my point.
> but I do hope we can keep it on the upside.
Way too late. Especially after you have returned to label
comments as R rated and to lecture about politeness.
John A. Peters
> Sometimes I ask a business acquaintance "What does your computer do
> for you besides the normal email, word processing, check writing and
> spread sheets?
>
> I would like to know the same about your use of Forth.
>
> Do you have a application coded in Forth or do you like many others
> dabble in Forth because it feels like fun? Please expound a bit.
>
> Thank You,
>
> John A. Peters, jape...@pacbell.net I am a F83s and Win32Forth
> applications user, specifier, tester, librarian & dreamer. I am a
> non-programmer, except as the apprentice 1/2 of a two man team via
> VNC. I have more ideas than expertise. The right question is half the
> answer, what do you want to know?
It actually takes a lot of thinking to come up
with a thread that develops interesting reading.
I think (really!) that this one is/was a good one.
It is hard to keep it on subject for very long,
and after a while they degrade in to interspersed
answers and attempts at clarification of misreading
and various misunderstandings.
I usually read all the coreespondance, and learn
a lot from them. I enjoy them.
I have copied twenty-five of the awnswers I got
I hope you enjoy them again like I did.
John A. Peters
------------------------------------------------------------
1)
For me, the applications are mostly machine controls. My use of Forth is
because it is the easiest programming environment for me to express the
problem domain and solution space.
I have used Forth for many years for controlling and testing scientific
instruments. An example would be the ASCA Silicon Imaging Spectrometer:
http://heasarc.gsfc.nasa.gov/docs/asca/asca_sis.html
2)
I set up the test station for this instrument in Forth.
The Forth language I used for this was LSE, a simplified dialect
descended from STOIC. I have recently reimplemented this for modern
hardware. I am now using my LSE64 on Linux as a development tool for
advanced x-ray imagers.
-jpd
3)
For it for embedded control and robotics apps.
Use some of the newmicros www.newmicros.com products.
Also use picforth a little.
4)
I'm writing a set of small Windows applications for a client.
They are data entry front ends for a MySQL database. The main
reason for choosing Forth was it's simple syntax, lack of
arcane incantations, speed and compactness of executable code
and the ability to cover the whole software spectrum between
twiddling bits and implementing abstract concepts.
If you're interested in some of the details, check out the
upcoming issue(s) of the German Forth magazine "Vierte Dimension".
kind regards,
s.
5)
What do you mean by "Implementing abstract concepts" ?
the final words in the forth source code are one kind
of abstract concept: they describe what's going on as
opposed to how it's going to be done.
If you want, you can go all the way to OO land, which is
abstraction in another direction.
Everything's possible, almost nothing hidden, very often
things are simpler than expected. Right now I'm replacing
a XML-based configuration file used for generating parts
of a website with a much simpler Forth-based solution.
s.
<lack of arcane incantations>
6)
There are many who would say Forth *is* an arcane incantation!
Not me, of course.
<nip. ---We went off track here for a bit -
7)
As a computer scientist, I used Forth for experiments with
programming language syntax and semantics. Forth was chosen
because it has no syntax checker to be circumvented, because
of easyness of [threaded] code generation, and because of
access to the return stack. (And all this by high-level means!)
7)
As a programmer, I used Forth
a) for implementing cross-assemblers and cross-compilers for Forth
(because there was a demand)
b) as a language for programming the stack processor TF-16
(stack processor = Forth processor, one of the cheapest/simplest
processor architectures)
8)
If you want to know of a Win32 application example, go to
http://www.eserv.ru/ -- Eserv is written in Forth (namely, SP-Forth),
not sure about their other products.
Eserv is a news/www/ftp/proxy server. They used to have both English and
Russian pages, but somewhy I see only Russian pages now.
http://www.serverwatch.com/stypes/servers/article.php/16161_1436321
Hello
we use FORTH for embedded control..motion and process. Some CNC
and more recently reconfigurable systems for X by wire systems.
See...
http://www.cimotion.com/index_files/eCAF_tech.htm
9)
for a (non available right now) prototype. We have used Swiftforth and
IForth recently on pc hosts, the above protoype uses a port of pfe to
ecos..and has a Python based interface. Most of the work is done in the
product development Lab at UBC..Cameleon controls is a spin off company.
regards
Ian
10)
I use it to write quick programs to compute things. Primarily number-crunching
applications. Sometimes to test ideas that are hard to implement in C or
Fortran.
Finally, when I was still teaching I used it as my in-class demo language
for illustrating ideas in a computational methods course. I could write
and debug a working program intelligibly, working in front of the class
on a projection screen. If something went wrong I could easily find out
what, so it was good for teaching students to test and analyze their
programs. I don't think there is any other language--well, maybe Lisp--
that would have permitted this directness. I have not heard of anyone
here doing CS 101 (where they teach C and C++) in front of their classes.
They don't dare--too many opportunities for embarrassment.
--
Julian V. Noble
11)
3 ways:
1) Business - At work I often need to help crunch data, either raw
output from dataloggers or data from a database. People come to me when
they can't get their "canned" database software to get things just
right. With Forth it is so easy. They think I'm really smart to do it
and do it so quickly, but that's not the case. Forth just makes me look
good.
2) Hobby - I have written and released into the public domain an airfoil
plotting program intended for use on model planes. It has been used
around the world with good success. It's called J-Foil, runs on
Macintoshes, and can be found lots of places if you do a Google search.
3) Pleasure - I find writing programs to solve specific problems like
interfacing a Forth to Mac OSX routines (List Manager, Popup menus,
etc.) to be relaxing and enjoyable. My version of working a crossword
puzzle, I guess.
Regards,
-Doug
12)
I use Forth for developing small low-power high-speed data acquisition and
control systems for basic research in underwater acoustics, u/w bio-sonar,
and behavior research. Forth's development efficiency and application
flexibility allows sparce basic research dollars to be stretched to
accomplish what would otherwise be prohibitively expensive goals.
John E. Sigurdson
Like many of the other responses here, I use Forth mainly
for instrument control and data acquisition [ using kForth
for these apps of course :) ]. I also now use iForth for
running some number crunching apps for science simulations
related to my research. I believe all of my research publications
( http://ccreweb.org/ccre/kmpubs.html ) have made use of
Forth, either for acquiring the data, reducing it (i.e.
curve fitting or other analysis), or modeling the systems.
Also, like Doug Hoffman, it serves as a mental diversion
from my other activities.
Krishna Myneni
Post a follow-up to
13)
That's so cool! Can you tell us what Mattel toys are programmed in Forth?
Cheers,
Elizabeth
14)
Alas, I can't. You might be a Hasbro spy... :) (Seriously, though,
one might read my words, and I don't reveal my employer's secrets)
I can say this much; a variant of Forth was created to avoid having
to do every toy in assembly, productivity went up at least 10X,
everyone who was using Forth technology was laid off, the two
engineers who spearheaded the effort (one of them was me) have
formed a new company that uses a Forth-like language for embedded
systems, we are at the pilot run stage right now, and all will be
revealed right here when we start taking orders and shipping product.
Sorry I can't say more at the moment.
<snipped> Off target stuff
15)
This reminds me of something that happened to Chuck and me in the very, very
early days of FORTH, Inc,, about 1974. Some folks in a division of a large
company in Ohio called and said they had a project involving a Nova
computer, taking & displaying data. They had been unable to get it done in
the several months' they had been working on it using Data General's
Fortran, etc., because of problems writing drivers for the data acquisition
device and plotter. They asked us to prove that Forth could do it. So we
went there, and promised to get it running in 3 days.
Now, although we had run Forth on Novas just fine, this one had a new disk
we hadn't seen (remember, this is a totally native Forth, no OS whatever,
all bare metal). So the first day we spent keying in a disk driver and
bootstrapping Forth in via paper tape and console switches. Painful. But
after that, things went swimmingly, and the second day we wrote the driver
for the data acquisition system and plotter, and on the third day
demonstrated the program to about 20 people (managers, programmers, etc.).
Everyone was very congratulatory and said we'd be hearing from them.
Two weeks later I phoned to follow up, and was told that the whole
programming staff had been sacked, including their manager who had called us
in, because we had demonstrated that they were incompetant. And, of course,
since we had proved the problem was trivial, they had no intention of hiring
us, they were going to get a new batch of programmers and start over.
16)
I usually find that it is easier to sell a Forth based project when you
handle the hardware and software aspects as a whole solution approach. The
client want to achieve objective X (specified as what their users want to
happen), you produce the whole gizmo and deliver. You may mention the Forth
basis or you may decide not to. Of course, it takes some time to develop
the bespoke hardware but the software solution can often be ready when the
first hardware arrives on the doorstep. In High Integrity systems you will
also have a great deal of paperwork to do as well.
<snip> Dilbert stuff
17)
In the 1983-1986 timeframe, I used the Epson QX-10 (I think) to do the
documentation for an app I had developed. Great little system. I
rented use on it at the local library. I think that it had a couple of
CPU's. I read a writeup on the development of Valdocs and I believe
that it was created on a distributed basis, and it even survived being
rehosted on a brand new version of Forth.
Steve Graham
18)
It would be neat to have a copy of the source code to see if it could be
updated.
Any one got a copy?
JaP
19)
Valdocs was written at a company called Rising Star Industries by
Chris Rutkowski, et al. I couldn't find anything recent on
Google.
--
dg
<snip> stuff about Pacbell and Packerd bell
<snip> stuff about cringing
20)
It seems Forth doesn't fit well with the typical business model. You
generally have to grow your own Forth programmers instead of
recruiting them.
This is where risk aversion comes into play. Here is the downside of
Forth, from the suits' point of view:
1. There is no loyalty these days. The Forther could leave, which
would cause a serious lapse in code maintainability.
2. It costs time and money to train a new Forther.
Those are just the facts. Then there are perceptions such as Forth
being a dead language, etc. If you have a large C code base, train a C
programmer to use Forth and C in the same project. Forth can perform a
supervisory role in mixed language projects to shorten development
time.
Forth is really the ideal language for a large company. They have
enough resources to handle their own risk management. In other words,
to grow and maintain a pool of Forth programmers. They can do more
projects in less time using Forth.
Of course, human nature is to play it safe. You won't get fired for
using prevailing methods.
Brad
<snip> about shortage of Forth programmers and training them
21)
I originally wrote an alarm clock in Foxplus, with a simple screen to accept
the alarm time. Then I upgraded it so I could wake up to watch late night TV
and still get a morning alarm. Then I realised I could use something more
flexible, so I wrote some FPC Forth that let me set almost any desired
combination that suited me, just using the Forth command line. (I also put
together a few batch files that let me run things straight from the DOS
command line too.) It also let me play with things like Zeller's congruence -
no Y2K trouble for me. It's really alpha release stuff, with features that
would count as bugs for anyone who doesn't know them, and I didn't provide a
manual since it wasn't for a broader market. Naturally efficiency isn't a
priority when you are trying to loop for delay purposes.
Anyhow, for wider public interest, here's the source, still running on FPC
but as you can see with variants to try out TCOM. PML.
( this source file will eventually implement a clock - 14.10.93 )
( one assumption in the following words is that they pass control )
( from each to the next in very short periods of time, so time delays )
( set up by one word are still approximately correct when its )
( successor starts up )
: FGT ; ( to have a place to forget to )
FORTH
DEFINED TARGET-INIT NIP #IF
TARGET
(317 more lines)
22)
At work :
1) Our specialised data capture device is programmed in Forth (MPE
cross compiler)
2) An application running "scripts" to display images on screen and to
show buttons which 'open documents'. Used by non-technical colleague to
create a front end to new "Demo CD". (VFX Forth for Windows)
3) Various mini-apps using VFX Forth for Windows:
a) password generator - allowing privileged access to our
commercial offerings.
b) File searcher which includes a text searcher ('cos Windows
doesn't do it).
c) Simple text editor.
d) Interface program to our data capture device.
.....
A future project (a specialised database) may be written in Forth.
Discussions are taking place now ...
>or do you like many others
>dabble in Forth because it feels like fun? Please expound a bit.
It IS fun. Often!
Graham Smith
23)
There is a program, written in Forth (SP-Forth), called nnCron. This is
Windows scheduler and full-blown automation manager. Using this program
one can automate most of Windows routine tasks using plain Forth.
Take a look at nnCron web-site ( http://www.nncron.ru/ ) or at online
nnCron docs ( http://www.nncron.ru/help/help.htm ). I'm pretty sure,
nnCron is one of the most popular schedulers/automation managers here in
Russia, so there are many users, who use Forth on a daily basis.
nnCron (read: Forth) mail-list, web-forum and newsgroup are available.
I hope you will find this info useful.
--
Best regards,
Valery Kondakoff
24)
Hi John,
I am currently porting the colorForth Editor from Pentium assembler to
colorForth.
I am doing this because it is fun!
I have also written/modified/adapted several mini applications for
colorForth : a simple game called "slime", "sound" which plays part of
Handel's Gavotte on your PC's speaker, "wood" which creates an imitation
pine block-board background etc...
Regards
Howerd 8^)
My current usage of Forth is as a scripting language for Delphi
applications. Delphi has an extensive suite of components and
makes it possible for a developer to build his own components.
So I've developed a Forth that takes the form of a component
that can be dropped into an application and used "out-of-the-box"
by writing a minimum amount of initialization code. It's extremely
handy as a testing and debugging tool and as a means of providing
a simple command language for an application.
There's more information about ,my project at
http://www.creoleforth.org.
25)
How the heck does that work?
Configure to do what?
It sounds interesting.
Is the code somewhat ANS standard?
jp
Jeff Fox
I can see that you got 0% of what I was talking about.
Let's see if I can be more explicit. Give the thread the
name Forth Interest.
> jape...@pacbell.net (John A. Peters) wrote in message news:<64d13f62.04092...@posting.google.com>...
> > Sometimes I ask a business acquaintance "What does your computer do
> > for you besides the normal email, word processing, check writing and
> > spread sheets?
The opening line made me cringe. What abnormal things does your
computer do for you? ;-)
> > I would like to know the same about your use of Forth.
You have an interest in what other people do with Forth. Why?
> > Do you have a application coded in Forth
I would assume that everyone in the group has applications
written in Forth that they use. This is a Forth newsgroup.
The point of programming languages is to program, to create
programs, programs that people use. Most of us have dozens
if not hundreds of them and many create more every day.
When Michael Coughlin refers to people who have an interest
in Forth based on having used a program written in Forth I
wonder what he is thinking. I would think that there are
no people who's interest in a language is based on simply
using a program written in that language. But that seems
to be the main item on your list.
I have a hard time understanding how anyone who does not
want to program would have an interst in a programming
language. I have a hard time understanding how someone
with an interest in a programming language would not have
to learn that language. How can one really know anything
about a language without learning it and using it? The
sort of 'understanding' that one is likely to get from
only observing from a distance is like a deaf person with
an interest in listening to symphonies or a blind person
with an interest in looking at oil paintings. Any
understanding requires some sort of participatory
experience.
Let me ask you one question. How long have you had an
'interest' in Forth?
> >or do you like many others
> > dabble in Forth because it feels like fun? Please expound a bit.
We have people who dabble, or who have only the most shallow
experiece with Forth. Those are the people I look to and to whom
we should expect to explain Forth to the rest of the world for us.
Good plan. ;-)
> It actually takes a lot of thinking to come up
> with a thread that develops interesting reading.
I guess an interesting thread once in a while might justify
a lot of failed experiments in developing interesting reading.
Of course I believe that we have very different definitions
of what is interesting reading. Someone who knows next to
nothing about Forth may be interested in being led by someone
slightly less blind than themselves. What you call interesting
reading is often what I call lowering the content to kindergarden
level.
We have already seen most of the people's pets before. We have
done the show and tell before. One of the things we did in
kindergarden was show and tell to learn about our peers and
learn to be able to present. Later in education the emphasis
tends to be more about giving bandwidth to the teacher or
professor. Show and tell is fine for kindergarden, and we
get so much of it in c.l.f that I wonder why anyone would
want to start up threads to rehash show and tell stories
again. Perhaps some people have trouble remembering what
people have told us in the past, over and over in some cases,
and need to be reminded regularly. Or perhaps they think it
makes intertesting reading material for newcomers.
> I think (really!) that this one is/was a good one.
I know. I feel a bit like someone trying to explain
to a child that the mischief that they are so proud of
was not something to be proud of. That's why I said that
I didn't think that you got any of the ideas that I was
trying to convey to you.
> It is hard to keep it on subject for very long,
> and after a while they degrade in to interspersed
> answers and attempts at clarification of misreading
> and various misunderstandings.
I think some of the threads that you start, what abnormal
thing do you do with Forth, how do you make money with Forth,
etc. are about as degraded as they can get out of the box.
They do tend to disolve eventually into just noise, but
they start out worse.
> I usually read all the coreespondance, and learn
> a lot from them. I enjoy them.
Your 'interest' in Forth 'interests' me. That's one of
the reasons that I asked how long you have had this 'interest'
at a distance in a computer programming language. It relates
to questions that I have about the Forth Interest Group.
I have been to many different meetings of various computer
and high technology related groups in the San Francisco Bay
area for more than twenty-five years. Most of the groups have
some things in common. FIG has some unique properties that
I have been trying to research and understand.
Go to a BSD group meeting here in Berkeley. What will everyone
have in common? They are all experts in BSD or deeply involved
in the process of becoming experts. The discussions will often
include details of the projects that people are working on and
there will be lots of questions and answers as the experts
educate one another.
That descibes a lot of groups that I have been to. But for some
reason Forth meetings include people who have an interest from
a distance in Forth. This seems to be a completely different
phenomenon than what I have seen with any other group. There
are people who come to these meetings who don't program in
Forth. This truely puzzles me.
I would think that if they have an interest in Forth then that means
that they want to learn Forth, or become a better Forth programmer.
I mean it is easy to learn and certainly anyone with any interest
would have to learn to it along the way or why would they be
interested?
This odd phenomenon frightens many people outside of the Forth
community, and a few inside of the Forth community. One of the
things that I discovered about Forth was that certain aspects of
it were very very difficult to explain to other people.
I was told many times by people that they had gone to a FIG meeting
and run into zealous Forth enthusiasts there they they tried to
have a conversation with. They told me that they could not understand
the fanatical enthusiasm that some of these people had for Forth and
tried to get some explanation. But they told me that when they asked
these Forth enthusiasts questions about programming, how say a Forth
programmer would do such and such that this programmer does in C
all the time that they learned that this Forth enthusiast not only
knew nothing about C, or programming in general, but actually didn't
even know how to program in Forth. Having been through the experience
of a professional programmer having been given the Forth sales pitch
by someone who didn't know how to program at all is probably the
quintessential story about Forth repeated by non-Forth programmers
who think Forth people are just nuts.
I think it is worse than the people who go around repeating that
Forth is unreadable (or brag that they get paid to do this) or
that Forth is out of date, dead, etc. Some people have complained
that unprofessional behavior by FIG caused many of the problems
with the image of Forth. But they tend to be complaining about
the many half-done, undocumented, buggy system, or published code that
got mangled into nonsense before being exposed to the public.
I haven't seen any discussions about what impression non-programming
Forth enthusiasts give to non-Forth programmers about Forth.
I would find such a discussion interesting.
I find it interesing because it has given the world an odd view of Forth.
It made them wonder if Forth was some sort of religion or cult.
(I am not talking about people who read this posted in c.l.f but
people outside the Forth community saying this about Forth.)
Why would non-programmers be trying to promote a programming language?
If it was really worth anything wouldn't they be programming in that
programming language? That's what programming languages are for,
programming. These are the questions people ask about Forth.
I heard many stories about professional programmers getting the
impression that Forth was not a programming language but had to
be something else simply because there were all these people
with a fanatical interst in Forth who could not program at all.
I have to admit that I was always at a loss to try to explain to
any of these professional programmers that there were actually
people who did program in Forth, that non-programming Forth
enthusiasts were not characteristic of Forth. Yet the mere
existence of people identifiying themselves as either very
bad programmers, or even non-programmers, but having some
interst in the Forth programming language always seemed to
be one of the biggest problems in getting anyone to take
Forth seriously.
And I have to admit that it is a phenomenon that interests me.
Why would anyone not interested in programming in a programming
language have an interest in a programming language? How could
that interest get so fanatical that they frighten professional
programmers away from Forth altogether? What is the nature of
this interst in Forth outside of an interest in programming?
> I have copied twenty-five of the awnswers I got
> I hope you enjoy them again like I did.
> John A. Peters
I'm waiting for the milk and graham crackers and later the
nap time. Show and tell will be fun again too, I learned
a lot when we did it last week. I always enjoy it. Will
we get to see Jimmy's turtle again this week? ;-)
Just how long have you had this 'interest' in not-programming in
Forth? Can you tell us about this interst? Is it a social thing
rather than a technical thing?
If you don't care enough about Forth programming to learn to
program in Forth then what is it about Forth that interests you?
I have an interest in understanding what interest non-programmers
have in Forth. It is one of those things that people interested
in programming in Forth are going to have to deal with. I wish
I could explain the phenomenon to other professional programmers
who get the impression from it that Forth has to be something
other than a programming language. I wish I understood it, it
would help me explain it to the folks who walk away, or run away,
from Forth because of it. Can you explain it to me so that I
can explain it to them.
Most programmers have an interest in not programming in Forth.
Few programmers have an interest in Forth. What interests
people in Forth if it isn't the programming? Sure some like
the theory, the simple systems that people can wrap their
minds around. But only programmers really get that involved
in a programming language. What is the 'else' about Forth
that so frightens mainstream programmers? Forth groupies?
Best Wishes
Bernd Paysan
> Why would anyone not interested in programming in a programming
> language have an interest in a programming language? How could
> that interest get so fanatical that they frighten professional
> programmers away from Forth altogether? What is the nature of
> this interst in Forth outside of an interest in programming?
Maybe it's the "billion dollar" thing Mike Coughlin talks about. If
Forth really was a billion dollar thing, advocates would benefit from
spreading the word, even without doing the job themselves. Think of
them as the Steve Ballmers of Forth. Before he came to Microsoft, he
managed a college football team and sold detergents for Procter &
Gamble. Then, at Microsoft, he sold BASIC and MS-DOS, as if it was a
football team or a detergent (and he's probably irritated now that you
can get a detergent unter the name "Linux", from the swiss Rösch
AG ;-).
Jeff Fox
I am sorry that you are disspointed that no Forth programmers
have been paid a billion dollars like you have been for
programming in C. Since you are not being hypocritical and
have personally earned a billon dollars for your your programming
I would suggest that you put your money where your mouth is.
I have suggest this to you many times before.
Take some that billion dollars that you earned by programming
in C instead of Forth and fund the writing of textbooks that you
always call for. Fund the printing and distribution of those
books with the billion that you made with your C programming.
Make it easy for college teachers and students to have access
to the books in their local bookstore. Then pay some lobbiests
to work on these people and show them the advantages of
teaching Forth. Take some of your billion dollars and do
something with it rather than just complaining to Forth
programmers that they haven't earned a billion dollars for
their programming like you have.
> To make a long story short, I think our disagreement might be
> summarized as follows. Forth is a billion dollar idea
> ($1,000,000,000).
They pay up by all means!
> Since there are no Forth programmers who have
> made a billion dollars, I am very dissapointed and am unhappy to
> have use programs written by the billion dollar software
> companies, usually in C.
That makes sense to me. ;-) If there were Forth programmers who
had made a billion dollars programming you could be happy about
using programs written by billion dollar software companies in C.
Perhaps you are just complaining that they haven't made a billion
dollars like you AND haven't put the billion dollar software
companies using C out of business. I guess to not be unhappy
when you see Forth programmers not just programmers earning a
billion dollars but replacing all the C software that you and
other people use too.
With all your money and expertise in Forth I don't see why you
don't just do it yourself. Why have you failed to write an
improved version of every piece of software in the world. I
am very dissapointed in you and it makes me unhappy. ;-)
> You, on the other hand, seem to be
> satisfied with much less financial success.
Less than what? Less than a personal billion dollars? I feel
very sorry for anyone who thinks that they need to get a billion
dollars to be satisfied. They won't be satisfied when they get
their billion anyway, and not many people will get that billion
anyway, and none of them will do it as programmers.
> I think Forth is a nice hobby.
Is Forth your hobby? If so it would be a nice hobby for you.
But that prompts me to ask, what is it about Forth that makes
it an interesing hobby for you. You don't talk about doing
programming in Forth. You only talk about talking about Forth
with your C programmer friends who generally agree that programming
in Forth is a bad thing. Or so you tell us. That seems to be
the other part of your Forth hobby, telling people in c.l.f that
programming in Forth is a bad thing.
> But even if someone made $1,000,000 using Forth, I'd
> still think they were using it as a hobby and not using it at
> its full potential.
Well since you have earned a billion dollars with your C
programming I can understand your dissapointment with Forth
programmers not earning as much as you. And since you have
already earned your billion with C I can see how you would
sneer at the thought of only earning a million using Forth.
That's way below the potential of billion dollar C programmers
like you.
> I hope that somebody will get their act together and use
> Forth effectively,
Not possible. As you say, you and your friends generally
agree that programming in Forth is just a bad idea. What more
do you need to say about it?
> if not to become very rich, at least to get
> more programmers to stop asking "Forth, what's that?"
Having more programmers ask "Forth, what's that?" is a
good thing. Having them ask you, that's the bad part. ;-)
> As you
> say, "Nothing is preventing them from doing this", to which I
> would add, all it takes is some good common sense.
Nothing but sanity and reality. These constriants do not seem
to apply to your world view, or at least your view of Forth
and computer programming. ;-)
Best Wishes
m-coughlin
>
> m-coughlin <m-cou...@comcast.net> wrote in message news:<41654FAD...@comcast.net>...
> Well since you have earned a billion dollars with your C
> programming I can understand your dissapointment with Forth
> programmers not earning as much as you. And since you have
> already earned your billion with C I can see how you would
> sneer at the thought of only earning a million using Forth.
> That's way below the potential of billion dollar C programmers
> like you.
I haven't made a billion dollars in the programming
business, then again I haven't lost billions of dollars in the
computing business as several companies have, including the
company where C was invented. I wouldn't want to make my money
selling software. It is not fun. If I was in the business of
selling software, I'd quit after I made a million dollars and do
something else. There might have been Forth programmers who did
that, but I haven't heard for sure.
m-coughlin
I've taken a long time to reply to this. It is a long
message and needs much thought. But since Jeff Fox wrote so many
new viewpoints on a subject that I think is extremely important,
I'll try to write a reply. I hope I'm not repeating myself too much.
Jeff Fox wrote:
[snip]
> I would assume that everyone in the group has applications
> written in Forth that they use. This is a Forth newsgroup.
> The point of programming languages is to program, to create
> programs, programs that people use. Most of us have dozens
> if not hundreds of them and many create more every day.
I have one that I haven't used much lately since I have been
neglecting the computers it runs on. That application is the
open boot ROM in Sun computers. It is an application that
everyone has to use, but it is designed so well that they don't
know its there. As each version gets better it becomes more
unlikely that a computer owner would have to do anything with
it.
Other Forth programs I've seen or heard about seem to be in
two categories. They are idiosyncratic creations that only their
authors know how to use, or they are trade secrets that can not
be revealed.
None of these examples is much of an inspiration for new
people to learn to program in Forth.
> When Michael Coughlin refers to people who have an interest
> in Forth based on having used a program written in Forth I
> wonder what he is thinking. I would think that there are
> no people who's interest in a language is based on simply
> using a program written in that language. But that seems
> to be the main item on your list.
Here is a summary of what I will elaborate on in the rest of
the message so anyone who is bored by the topic can skip it.
Forth is an interesting logical and mathematical study but it
has never been made into a practical method of programming that
someone would want to use without making changes.
> I have a hard time understanding how anyone who does not
> want to program would have an interst in a programming
> language. I have a hard time understanding how someone
> with an interest in a programming language would not have
> to learn that language. How can one really know anything
> about a language without learning it and using it? The
> sort of 'understanding' that one is likely to get from
> only observing from a distance is like a deaf person with
> an interest in listening to symphonies or a blind person
> with an interest in looking at oil paintings. Any
> understanding requires some sort of participatory
> experience.
>
> Let me ask you one question. How long have you had an
> 'interest' in Forth?
I have had an interest in Forth since I saw it as the control
software for an astronomical telescope in the early 1980's.
After I had it running on my home computer, I thought surely
this would replace inferior ways of programming, such as
assembly language. I have been waiting for that to happen ever since.
[snip]
> We have people who dabble, or who have only the most shallow
> experiece with Forth. Those are the people I look to and to
> whom we should expect to explain Forth to the rest of the world
> for us. Good plan. ;-)
If the people who use Forth extensively only use it to
communicate with machines, and the hobbyists who know less write
most of the web pages and other articles about Forth, then we
will have to depend on people who only dabble a little with
Forth to explain it to other human beings.
[snip]
> I have been to many different meetings of various computer
> and high technology related groups in the San Francisco Bay
> area for more than twenty-five years. Most of the groups have
> some things in common. FIG has some unique properties that
> I have been trying to research and understand.
>
> Go to a BSD group meeting here in Berkeley. What will everyone
> have in common? They are all experts in BSD or deeply involved
> in the process of becoming experts. The discussions will often
> include details of the projects that people are working on and
> there will be lots of questions and answers as the experts
> educate one another.
>
> That describes a lot of groups that I have been to. But for some
> reason Forth meetings include people who have an interest from
> a distance in Forth. This seems to be a completely different
> phenomenon than what I have seen with any other group. There
> are people who come to these meetings who don't program in
> Forth. This truly puzzles me.
I've seen this situation in the Boston area. I could explain
it, but I might not be believed. I will try anyway.
C and Unix are the result of a long evolution in languages
and operating systems. At some point, many programmers said the
low level part of programming has been solved and we can
concentrate on writing high level applications. Forth
programmers don't say that. They say Forth is great but we have
to add and remove some things. What these are is never settled.
Forth has not evolved to the point where many programmers say
the low level part is solved.
There are many aspects to the use of BSD Unix that are quite
different from concerns of Forth programmers. The code for BSD
has always been academic and freely licensed. The form of this
license has been hotly debated, but idea of publishing the
source freely has never been questioned. Then there is the
matter of "forks". All the source of BSD is supposed to be kept
in one big collection. How something that big can be understood
or managed is beyond me. But every once in a while the
programmers working on the BSD source collection get into a big
disagreement. They then barrage each other with hostile email,
which is archived for historical study and can be referenced at
any time. When the problem cannot be resolved, the programmers
split into two groups and hurl the ultimate insult. Each group
accuses the other of "forking" the source tree. They then go off
and add to the BSD sources without coordination. But since the
code is free to copy, they steal each other's ideas (with
acknowledgments), and the versions don't get too far apart.
There are three versions of BSD Unix. One optimized for Intel
processors, one for every processor from a 68000 and 80386 and
up, and one for high security.
This must seem like a very strange situation to Forth
programmers, who have forked Forth hundreds of times. Perhaps
even the same Forth programmer has done it to his system several
times in one day. While Forth programmers are changing things
around, the BSD C programmers are writing things like the code
that runs the internet.
C/Unix and BSD have written standards, but they don't
count. Instead of writing standards, C/Unix programmers just
try to do the same thing. They want to use the same compiler,
the same libraries and the same little application programs. The
different versions of these are seen as problems to be
eliminated. That is why the term "fork" has such a bad
implication.
> I would think that if they have an interest in Forth then that
> means that they want to learn Forth, or become a better Forth
> programmer. I mean it is easy to learn and certainly anyone
> with any interest would have to learn to it along the way or
> why would they be interested?
>
> This odd phenomenon frightens many people outside of the Forth
> community, and a few inside of the Forth community. One of the
> things that I discovered about Forth was that certain aspects of
> it were very very difficult to explain to other people.
>
> I was told many times by people that they had gone to a FIG
> meeting and run into zealous Forth enthusiasts there they they
> tried to have a conversation with. They told me that they
> could not understand the fanatical enthusiasm that some of
> these people had for Forth and tried to get some explanation.
Ah, I am one of those missionary Forthaholics. But I also
know I am not making a good case for Forth when I say things
like the best book on programming was written for Forth but you
can't buy it anymore. Well, how can we write new and better
editions of our textbooks when we are still debating what Forth
is or what it should be? Or if we don't even think we need a textbook?
> But they told me that when they asked these Forth enthusiasts
> questions about programming, how say a Forth programmer would
> do such and such that this programmer does in C all the time
> that they learned that this Forth enthusiast not only knew
> nothing about C, or programming in general, but actually didn't
> even know how to program in Forth. Having been through the
> experience of a professional programmer having been given the
> Forth sales pitch by someone who didn't know how to program at
> all is probably the quintessential story about Forth repeated
> by non-Forth programmers who think Forth people are just nuts.
I see beyond what you have described. If an expert Forth
programmer pulled out his laptop computer and instantly showed
how to rewrite any C routine in Forth, would that help the
situation? Or would it just demonstrate how Forth programmers
use magic or know thousands of difficult tricks that no other
programmer would be able to remember?
> I think it is worse than the people who go around repeating that
> Forth is unreadable (or brag that they get paid to do this) or
> that Forth is out of date, dead, etc.
Forth code is unreadable, and worse yet, when Forth
programmers are repeatedly told this, they do not get the
message. Compared with the old days, Forth is out of date, dead,
etc. I meet more people who tell me they used to be paid to
program in Forth then I meet who might want to learn Forth, even
tho I tell anybody who has a slight interest in programming they
should take a look at Forth.
> Some people have complained that unprofessional behavior by
> FIG caused many of the problems with the image of Forth.
> But they tend to be complaining about the many half-done,
> undocumented, buggy system, or published code that got mangled
> into nonsense before being exposed to the public. I haven't
> seen any discussions about what impression non-programming
> Forth enthusiasts give to non-Forth programmers about Forth.
> I would find such a discussion interesting.
The many half-done, undocumented, buggy systems, and
published code that got mangled into nonsense before being
exposed to the public are the things that are easy to find. This
is true of programs written in any language. You have to look
around for a while before you find something good. When I go
thru the shareware web sites, I reject most of the programs. They
don't do anything I need, they are poorly organized, much too
big, and cost money. But after a while I find one that does
something useful and is so well thought out that I wish I could
have written it myself. And it is free, or it is shareware where
the author says if you are too cheap to send money you can use
it anyway but you'll not encourage him to write anything more.
Those are the programs I try to give to my friends before they
buy something that is not as good. But I am usually too late.
None of these good programs are written in Forth.
[snip]
From the viewpoint of any non-Forth programmer, all Forth
programmers are in the same situation. Pick any language and any
industry. Programmers in that industry will come across dozens
or hundreds of programs written in the language they use and not
see anything written in Forth. If you tell them about something
written in Forth from a company in New Zealand, or hiding in the
special computer from the delivery company or used to control
part of a telescope in outer space, they will not be very
impressed, unless they live in New Zealand and are getting ready
to ship their telescope to the earth satellite assembly center
at TRW. If you tell them that Forth is used to run their washing
machine or is the program in the computer that controls the fuel
injector in their automobile, then they might be impressed. But
we don't tell them that, do we? Maybe the Forth code is there
but the programmer who wrote it is under a non-disclosure agreement.
I'm on the side of those non-programmers you complain
about. Forth is interesting in itself, just written down,
without a computer. Its a machine readable version of symbolic
logic. I once gave a talk about Forth to a home computer club
when they couldn't get a computer running for me to use. I said
no problem, I'll just use the blackboard. I showed them how
Forth was a clear and simple way to get the computer to do
something. They were impressed. The non-programmers learned a
little about programming and the programmers expressed an
interest in learning more about Forth.
Someday I hope to impress programmers even more with a
Forth application they can use or a free Forth system written in
Forth instead of masm, that doesn't need to run under MS-Dos,
and has a listing they can understand. After thirty years of the
existence of Forth, that should be possible.
Elizabeth D Rather
> ...
> > I would assume that everyone in the group has applications
> > written in Forth that they use. This is a Forth newsgroup.
> > The point of programming languages is to program, to create
> > programs, programs that people use. Most of us have dozens
> > if not hundreds of them and many create more every day.
>
> I have one that I haven't used much lately since I have been
> neglecting the computers it runs on. That application is the
> open boot ROM in Sun computers. It is an application that
> everyone has to use, but it is designed so well that they don't
> know its there. As each version gets better it becomes more
> unlikely that a computer owner would have to do anything with
> it.
It wasn't designed to be used by computer owners, but by the OS, maintenance
techs, and folks bringing up new devices.
> Other Forth programs I've seen or heard about seem to be in
> two categories. They are idiosyncratic creations that only their
> authors know how to use, or they are trade secrets that can not
> be revealed.
That's probably true of most programs that run in embedded systems, which
has been the primary area in which Forth has been successful.
> ...
> If the people who use Forth extensively only use it to
> communicate with machines, and the hobbyists who know less write
> most of the web pages and other articles about Forth, then we
> will have to depend on people who only dabble a little with
> Forth to explain it to other human beings.
Fortunately there are some of us who use Forth extensively for a lot of
purposes, and have invested a lot of energy in writing books, web sites,
evaluation versions, givng talks, hosting booths at trade shows, etc. I
include myself, of course. Fortunately, there are others (although not as
many as I'd like to see).
> > ...
> >
> > Go to a BSD group meeting here in Berkeley. What will everyone
> > have in common? They are all experts in BSD or deeply involved
> > in the process of becoming experts. The discussions will often
> > include details of the projects that people are working on and
> > there will be lots of questions and answers as the experts
> > educate one another.
> >
> > That describes a lot of groups that I have been to. But for some
> > reason Forth meetings include people who have an interest from
> > a distance in Forth. This seems to be a completely different
> > phenomenon than what I have seen with any other group. There
> > are people who come to these meetings who don't program in
> > Forth. This truly puzzles me.
Puzzles me, too. And it's self-perpetuating: I have urged professional
Forth users I know to go to some of these meetings, and they never go back,
because they see only casual users & hobbyists there.
> ...
> There are many aspects to the use of BSD Unix that are quite
> different from concerns of Forth programmers. The code for BSD
> has always been academic and freely licensed. The form of this
> license has been hotly debated, but idea of publishing the
> source freely has never been questioned.
This in itself isn't that different from the Forth situation. There are
(and always have been) public-domain versions of Forth as well as commercial
ones, and there are also commercial versions of Unix and C.
> Then there is the
> matter of "forks". All the source of BSD is supposed to be kept
> in one big collection. How something that big can be understood
> or managed is beyond me. But every once in a while the
> programmers working on the BSD source collection get into a big
> disagreement. They then barrage each other with hostile email,
> which is archived for historical study and can be referenced at
> any time. When the problem cannot be resolved, the programmers
> split into two groups and hurl the ultimate insult. Each group
> accuses the other of "forking" the source tree. They then go off
> and add to the BSD sources without coordination. But since the
> code is free to copy, they steal each other's ideas (with
> acknowledgments), and the versions don't get too far apart.
> There are three versions of BSD Unix. One optimized for Intel
> processors, one for every processor from a 68000 and 80386 and
> up, and one for high security.
Forth needs to satisfy a much wider spectrum of needs than variants of Unix,
ranging from 8-bit microcontrollers to large workstations (like the Sun).
Folks working on particular variants can (and often do) exercise a lot of
discipline with respect to version control, but I think the diversity of
goals of systems precludes the kind of narrow control that the maintainers
of the various Unix versions adhere to.
> > ...
> > I was told many times by people that they had gone to a FIG
> > meeting and run into zealous Forth enthusiasts there they they
> > tried to have a conversation with. They told me that they
> > could not understand the fanatical enthusiasm that some of
> > these people had for Forth and tried to get some explanation.
>
> Ah, I am one of those missionary Forthaholics. But I also
> know I am not making a good case for Forth when I say things
> like the best book on programming was written for Forth but you
> can't buy it anymore. Well, how can we write new and better
> editions of our textbooks when we are still debating what Forth
> is or what it should be? Or if we don't even think we need a textbook?
No, you certainly aren't making a good case for Forth, since what you say is
not true There are new books, and there is a pretty strong consensus now on
what Forth "is and should be", consisting of both a mainstream of
predominant usage (following ANS Forth) and a healthy fringe of
experimentors exploring new strategies. In fact, there is much better
consensus on Forth usage now than there ever has been in my experience.
> > But they told me that when they asked these Forth enthusiasts
> > questions about programming, how say a Forth programmer would
> > do such and such that this programmer does in C all the time
> > that they learned that this Forth enthusiast not only knew
> > nothing about C, or programming in general, but actually didn't
> > even know how to program in Forth. Having been through the
> > experience of a professional programmer having been given the
> > Forth sales pitch by someone who didn't know how to program at
> > all is probably the quintessential story about Forth repeated
> > by non-Forth programmers who think Forth people are just nuts.
>
> I see beyond what you have described. If an expert Forth
> programmer pulled out his laptop computer and instantly showed
> how to rewrite any C routine in Forth, would that help the
> situation? Or would it just demonstrate how Forth programmers
> use magic or know thousands of difficult tricks that no other
> programmer would be able to remember?
Having done just that many times, I find it's usually helpful.
> > I think it is worse than the people who go around repeating that
> > Forth is unreadable (or brag that they get paid to do this) or
> > that Forth is out of date, dead, etc.
>
> Forth code is unreadable, and worse yet, when Forth
> programmers are repeatedly told this, they do not get the
> message.
As one who spends much of my life reading Forth code written by other
people, I know that this flat assertion that "Forth code is unreadable" is
patently untrue. Since most of the Forth programmers I know read each
other's code regularly, it's not surprising that they "do not get the
message." It's because the "message" is a lie in their own daily
experience.
> [snip]
> ...
> From the viewpoint of any non-Forth programmer, all Forth
> programmers are in the same situation. Pick any language and any
> industry. Programmers in that industry will come across dozens
> or hundreds of programs written in the language they use and not
> see anything written in Forth. ...
> If you tell them that Forth is used to run their washing
> machine or is the program in the computer that controls the fuel
> injector in their automobile, then they might be impressed. But
> we don't tell them that, do we? Maybe the Forth code is there
> but the programmer who wrote it is under a non-disclosure agreement.
Ok, there are about 50 computers in the average automobile today. Can you
tell me the language *any* of them were programmed in? Or your washing
machine? Or your VCR? Could be Forth, how would you know?
> ...
> Someday I hope to impress programmers even more with a
> Forth application they can use or a free Forth system written in
> Forth instead of masm, that doesn't need to run under MS-Dos,
> and has a listing they can understand. After thirty years of the
> existence of Forth, that should be possible.
Well, how many subscribers to DirecTV do you suppose there are? Would it
help to know that all of DirecTV's uplink antennas are programmed in Forth?
Or their Apple or Sun computers?
And there are plenty of good Forth systems written in Forth, but unless they
ran under an OS such as Windows, 95% of computers would be off limits to
them, so they won't make many converts.
Guy Macon
m-coughlin wrote:
>If you tell them that Forth is used to run their washing
>machine or is the program in the computer that controls the fuel
>injector in their automobile, then they might be impressed. But
>we don't tell them that, do we? Maybe the Forth code is there
>but the programmer who wrote it is under a non-disclosure agreement.
Guilty as charged.
You have my permission to tell people that millions of Mattel
toys have been programmed in a Forth variant. No, I cannot
reveal the code itself, but it would be of little use to
anyone who isn't programming for extreme-low-end Asian uPs
with minimum order quantities of 50,000 to 100,000 masked
ROM parts.
>I thought surely this would replace inferior ways of
>programming, such as assembly language.
That's what is was used for when I was working for Mattel.
Bernd Paysan
> Forth code is unreadable, and worse yet, when Forth
> programmers are repeatedly told this, they do not get the
> message.
I know that you like to post that frequently, but I can only tell you why we
do not get the message: It's a wrong generalization. Forth code can be
unreadable, and I've seen a fair share of unreadable code. It's unreadable,
because it's badly factored, digs too deep in the stack, and has too many
control structures. I also know a fair share of unreadable C code: The
TCP/IP-stack of Linux is a good example. It suffers from exactly the same
fate, but instead of "digging to deep in stack" it has too many
non-descriptive variables, cluttered around in structures.
Telling Forth programmers that Forth is (by itself) "unreadable" is like
telling Chinese writers that Chinese is (by itself) "unreadable". They
won't get the message, either. Well written Chinese expresses ideas more
concise and clearly than many other languages. The way these expressions
are written are quite different from all western languages. That's exactly
like Forth. Maybe you should really read Thinking Forth, instead of
complaining that Starting Forth is out of print.
If you want Forth to become another C/Unix, don't do it. It's a pointless
exercise. C/Unix are already there. Or Perl, you other favorite "what Forth
should be". Forth is Forth, it's neither C/Unix nor Perl. Why don't
Forthers write TCP/IP stacks? Well, apart from that they actually do (like
MPE), Howard Oakford has given a nice explanation, after having implemented
UDP/IP: "I found no elegant way to express TCP yet". That's because it's
not an elegant protocol, and the Linux TCP/IP stack proves the point, by
being written in unreadable C code.
Jeff Fox
> > I would assume that everyone in the group has applications
> > written in Forth that they use. This is a Forth newsgroup.
> > The point of programming languages is to program, to create
> > programs, programs that people use. Most of us have dozens
> > if not hundreds of them and many create more every day.
>
> I have one that I haven't used much lately since I have been
> neglecting the computers it runs on. That application is the
> open boot ROM in Sun computers. It is an application that
> everyone has to use, but it is designed so well that they don't
> know its there. As each version gets better it becomes more
> unlikely that a computer owner would have to do anything with
> it.
I would not classify a bios or open boot rom as an application
program, but rather as a component of an OS. One might argue
that every component of an OS was written as an application by
someone, but they are not used as applcitions, they are used
as components of an OS. Calling bios call 10 with an argument
of 2 an applcation is stretching things a bit just as calling
open boot a user level application program is clearly not an
example of an application program.
> Other Forth programs I've seen or heard about seem to be in
> two categories. They are idiosyncratic creations that only their
> authors know how to use, or they are trade secrets that can not
> be revealed.
And there are also published examples, tutorials, and lots of
public code that is neither idiosyncratic or trade secret. Don't
forget those examples.
> None of these examples is much of an inspiration for new
> people to learn to program in Forth.
If you filter out the published examples, the tutorials and the
public code and only refer to code that isn't public then yes,
code that other people don't see is not likely to inspire them.
But open you eyes man! Not all Forth code is private commercial
code or private hobbiest code.
> > When Michael Coughlin refers to people who have an interest
> > in Forth based on having used a program written in Forth I
> > wonder what he is thinking. I would think that there are
> > no people who's interest in a language is based on simply
> > using a program written in that language. But that seems
> > to be the main item on your list.
>
> Here is a summary of what I will elaborate on in the rest of
> the message so anyone who is bored by the topic can skip it.
> Forth is an interesting logical and mathematical study but it
> has never been made into a practical method of programming that
> someone would want to use without making changes.
Nonsense. You are just repeating anti-Forth sound-bites without
any substance behind your statements. For 'you' it has been
a subject of mathematical interest but not practical programming
study. Thus it is true that for you it is an intellectual
curriosity that has no practical value for programming. So
you refer to unnamed experience Forth programmers who told
you this or told you that. But you simply ignore all examples
from all the experienced Forth programmes who have had a dialog
with you over the years. You shut up for a while when people
provide the examples that you have claimed don't exsit. But
then you always come back a couple of months later repeating
your claims that such examples simply don't exist. It doesn't
seem to matter how many times people who you examples, you
seem to forget them and return a few months later repeating
the same anti-Forth sound-bites and repeating all the false
claims that there are no examples of this, no examples of
that, that Forth is not a practical method of programming,
that Forth programmers can't write documentation, that
experience Forth programmers (except the unnamed ones that
you quote from the past) have no programs. It is bizzare.
> > I have a hard time understanding how anyone who does not
> > want to program would have an interst in a programming
> > language. I have a hard time understanding how someone
> > with an interest in a programming language would not have
> > to learn that language. How can one really know anything
> > about a language without learning it and using it? The
> > sort of 'understanding' that one is likely to get from
> > only observing from a distance is like a deaf person with
> > an interest in listening to symphonies or a blind person
> > with an interest in looking at oil paintings. Any
> > understanding requires some sort of participatory
> > experience.
> >
> > Let me ask you one question. How long have you had an
> > 'interest' in Forth?
>
> I have had an interest in Forth since I saw it as the control
> software for an astronomical telescope in the early 1980's.
> After I had it running on my home computer, I thought surely
> this would replace inferior ways of programming, such as
> assembly language. I have been waiting for that to happen ever since.
You got a Forth running on a home computer, so what applications
did you write in that Forth? Do you have any real experience or is
it entirely in a vacume of actual facts? You have written that what
other people say about Forth could not be true (productivity reports)
or it would have 'conquered the world.'
What's funny to me is that you don't seem to realize what the
rest of the world things of non-programmers who go around talking
about how Forth should conquer the world. Many people have the
impression that all Forth enthusiasts are non-programmers who
are trying to conquer the world promoting Forth and they look
very very silly to both Forth and non-Forth professionals.
> [snip]
>
> > We have people who dabble, or who have only the most shallow
> > experiece with Forth. Those are the people I look to and to
> > whom we should expect to explain Forth to the rest of the world
> > for us. Good plan. ;-)
They (you) do a good job of repeating every popular anti-Forth
sound-bite in the name of promoting Forth. Bizzare.
> If the people who use Forth extensively only use it to
> communicate with machines,
Of course they don't, they also use it to communicate with
each other. Since you don't program in Forth it doesn't
communicate very well to you, so you repeat anti-Forth
sound-bites to communicate with other people who don't
program in Forth.
> and the hobbyists who know less write
> most of the web pages and other articles about Forth, then we
> will have to depend on people who only dabble a little with
> Forth to explain it to other human beings.
I know that you have considered everyone dependent on your
taking up the task of explaining Forth to other human beings
because you don't like what Forth programmers say about Forth.
You feel that you fill the need to repeat all the popular
anti-Forth sound-bites and you like to refer to that as
'explaining it to other human beings.' ;-)
I can agree with that.
> Forth has not evolved to the point where many programmers say
> the low level part is solved.
I can agree with that too. Not many, there are just not that
many Forth programmers. Forth programmers know that the low
level part has been solved, but there are not 'many' programmers
who use Forth compared to the large number who don't.
So the majority view, the view of non-Forth programmers, is that
Forth has certainly not solved those problems. But of course
the view of a minorty, to which you do not belong, Forth programmers,
is that it is a solved problem.
But I also understand that the idea that 'low level' includes the
OS that instead of solving the problem with a one size fits all
universal OS that the low level code can be tailored to a particular
problem are very different approaches. Those who feel that the
only solution is a univeral OS with lots of 'low level' code
will never see the custom OS approach as a solution. So if you
think the only solution is the generic OS then one might argue
that Forth 'has not evolved to that point yet.'
But of course Forth has evolved in different directions than that.
> There are many aspects to the use of BSD Unix that are quite
> different from concerns of Forth programmers. The code for BSD
> has always been academic and freely licensed. The form of this
> license has been hotly debated, but idea of publishing the
> source freely has never been questioned. Then there is the
> matter of "forks". All the source of BSD is supposed to be kept
> in one big collection. How something that big can be understood
> or managed is beyond me. But every once in a while the
> programmers working on the BSD source collection get into a big
> disagreement. They then barrage each other with hostile email,
> which is archived for historical study and can be referenced at
> any time. When the problem cannot be resolved, the programmers
> split into two groups and hurl the ultimate insult. Each group
> accuses the other of "forking" the source tree. They then go off
> and add to the BSD sources without coordination. But since the
> code is free to copy, they steal each other's ideas (with
> acknowledgments), and the versions don't get too far apart.
> There are three versions of BSD Unix. One optimized for Intel
> processors, one for every processor from a 68000 and 80386 and
> up, and one for high security.
Sounds a lot like the the history of Forth too.
> This must seem like a very strange situation to Forth
> programmers, who have forked Forth hundreds of times. Perhaps
> even the same Forth programmer has done it to his system several
> times in one day. While Forth programmers are changing things
> around, the BSD C programmers are writing things like the code
> that runs the internet.
There are more C programmers than Forth programmers so a blind
person might see that C programmers write code that runs the
internet and not realize that there are also Forth programmers
who write code that runs the internet. The internet is not
completely written in C. Give us a break. Servers and
routers and clients written in Forth are also out there
running the internet. Saying the internet IS C is
ridiculous, but saying that there is more C than Forth is
a true statement.
> C/Unix and BSD have written standards, but they don't
> count. Instead of writing standards, C/Unix programmers just
> try to do the same thing.
Now you are getting at the key issue.
> They want to use the same compiler,
> the same libraries and the same little application programs.
Not to mention that they want to use C. They do not want
to use Forth. They are the majority, we know. ;-)
> The
> different versions of these are seen as problems to be
> eliminated. That is why the term "fork" has such a bad
> implication.
As in the phrase 'Fork you?'
> > I would think that if they have an interest in Forth then that
> > means that they want to learn Forth, or become a better Forth
> > programmer. I mean it is easy to learn and certainly anyone
> > with any interest would have to learn to it along the way or
> > why would they be interested?
> >
> > This odd phenomenon frightens many people outside of the Forth
> > community, and a few inside of the Forth community. One of the
> > things that I discovered about Forth was that certain aspects of
> > it were very very difficult to explain to other people.
> >
> > I was told many times by people that they had gone to a FIG
> > meeting and run into zealous Forth enthusiasts there they they
> > tried to have a conversation with. They told me that they
> > could not understand the fanatical enthusiasm that some of
> > these people had for Forth and tried to get some explanation.
>
> Ah, I am one of those missionary Forthaholics.
That was my point. Non-Forth programmers, or non-programmers
trying to promote Forth, self-labeled missionary Forthaholics
wbo don't program in Forth are the source of the most damaging
anti-Forth sound-bites. Because of the people who don't
understand Forth, but are trying to promote it, say the
most bizzare things about Forth they have been the main source
for the anti-Forth sound-bites that have become so popular
with Forth haters.
> But I also
> know I am not making a good case for Forth when I say things
> like the best book on programming was written for Forth but you
> can't buy it anymore.
That is true if you don't include the statement that Starting
Forth and Thinking Forth are now free on the internet. It is
fine if it is your opinion that one of those is the best book
ever written on Forth. It is fine to tell people they are
out of print, but not fine if you don't mention that they
can get them for free on the internet.
> Well, how can we write new and better
> editions of our textbooks when we are still debating what Forth
> is or what it should be? Or if we don't even think we need a textbook?
We? We? We write? What have you written? We debate? We don't
think? We don't need? I often wonder who this 'we' you refer to
is since it doesn't seem to include you. Bizzare.
> > But they told me that when they asked these Forth enthusiasts
> > questions about programming, how say a Forth programmer would
> > do such and such that this programmer does in C all the time
> > that they learned that this Forth enthusiast not only knew
> > nothing about C, or programming in general, but actually didn't
> > even know how to program in Forth. Having been through the
> > experience of a professional programmer having been given the
> > Forth sales pitch by someone who didn't know how to program at
> > all is probably the quintessential story about Forth repeated
> > by non-Forth programmers who think Forth people are just nuts.
>
> I see beyond what you have described. If an expert Forth
> programmer pulled out his laptop computer and instantly showed
> how to rewrite any C routine in Forth, would that help the
> situation?
What situation? It might help with some, except if you are
involved in the 'situation' the answer to whether showing
you anything will improve anything is most likely no. You
have shown that you just filter out whatever you are shown
when it invalidates your mistaken ideas. You prefer to hold
to the mistaken ideas than to learn from examples in this
sort of situation.
> Or would it just demonstrate how Forth programmers
> use magic or know thousands of difficult tricks that no other
> programmer would be able to remember?
It would demonstrate that you could filter out any teaching
that someone would give you regarding Forth. Even if they
could 'instantly show you ...' it wouldn't help you, or so
you say.
Magic is where you find it. If you don't understand Forth,
if you choose to ignore and throw out advice about Forth,
it may just look like magic to you. If you don't want it
to look like magic to you, and if you don't believe in magic,
then you have to learn to understand it. Programming in Forth
is really the only way to understand it, you will never
understand it by quoting what some unnamed Forth expert told
you at some distant time in the past.
> > I think it is worse than the people who go around repeating that
> > Forth is unreadable (or brag that they get paid to do this) or
> > that Forth is out of date, dead, etc.
>
> Forth code is unreadable,
Just negative sound-bites, anti-Forth sound-bites. No real meaning.
You are just being bad.
> and worse yet,
Just negative sound-bites, anti-Forth sound-bites. No real meaning.
You are just trying to be worse.
> when Forth
> programmers are repeatedly told this,
They say you are just repeatedly repeating negative sound-bites
repeated by Forth haters and that you don't understand Forth.
> they do not get the
> message.
They get the message that you are just repeatedly repeating
negative sound-bites repeated by Forth haters and that you
don't understand Forth. As actual Forth programmers they
know that what you are saying isn't true.
> Compared with the old days, Forth is out of date, dead,
Just negative sound-bites, anti-Forth sound-bites. No real meaning.
We all know the list well.
There are more non-programmers than programmers. Thus programmers
are wrong. There are more non-Forth programmers than Forth
programmers. Therefor Forth programmers are wrong.
> etc. I meet more people who tell me they used to be paid to
> program in Forth then I meet who might want to learn Forth, even
> tho I tell anybody who has a slight interest in programming they
> should take a look at Forth.
After you tell them that it is dead, unreadable, out of date,
etc. you tell them to look at it? Don't you think that is a
bit of a mixed message? ;-)
> > Some people have complained that unprofessional behavior by
> > FIG caused many of the problems with the image of Forth.
> > But they tend to be complaining about the many half-done,
> > undocumented, buggy system, or published code that got mangled
> > into nonsense before being exposed to the public. I haven't
> > seen any discussions about what impression non-programming
> > Forth enthusiasts give to non-Forth programmers about Forth.
> > I would find such a discussion interesting.
>
> The many half-done, undocumented, buggy systems, and
> published code that got mangled into nonsense before being
> exposed to the public are the things that are easy to find.
True.
> This
> is true of programs written in any language.
Yes, but there are lots of books, and lots of system code in
C for the programs that people are taught in school. You tell
us this all the time. There are 300 books on C++ in the local
store but none on Forth, right? So because they don't have
all this academic literature and examples from their classroom
on the subject of Forth people go to the internet where they
are more likely to find half-done, undocumented, buggy Forth.
That is why it more an issue for Forth than 'any' language.
You have told us this yourself many many times.
> You have to look
> around for a while before you find something good. When I go
> thru the shareware web sites, I reject most of the programs. They
> don't do anything I need, they are poorly organized, much too
> big, and cost money. But after a while I find one that does
> something useful and is so well thought out that I wish I could
> have written it myself. And it is free, or it is shareware where
> the author says if you are too cheap to send money you can use
> it anyway but you'll not encourage him to write anything more.
> Those are the programs I try to give to my friends before they
> buy something that is not as good. But I am usually too late.
>
> None of these good programs are written in Forth.
C programs are not written in Forth, duh. The 'good' C programs
you found were not written in Forth, duh. We know that you are
incapable of finding good Forth, but that's just you. You have
to maintain that position because it is the one that you have
been defending for years, you won't accept any Forth
as good because you deny that any exists. If you define it as
bad then all examples (that you don't refuse to see) are just
proof that it is bad to you. So you just repeat all those
Forth hater's negative sound-bites that we all know so well.
Then a couple of months later, after ignoreing what everyone
has said to you, you return to repeat the same old stale
anti-Forth rhetoric again. Yeah, yeah, yeah, we know it by
heart by now.
We have always had some moles in the Forth community,
people who enjoy giving all the Forth community a bad
reputation by joining the Forth community only to repeat
the anti-Forth sound-bites popular with Forth haters.
These moles often want to give the world the impression
that Forth is for missionary Forthaholics who can't
actually program in Forth and just want to make Forth
look like some silly religion to the rest of the world.
This then results in Forth programmers and professionals
using Forth to be confused with these non-programming
Forthaholic religious missionairies. The moles do
a good job at this. Infiltrate and subvert.
> From the viewpoint of any non-Forth programmer, all Forth
> programmers are in the same situation.
Really? How is that? They know something about Forth?
> Pick any language and any industry.
Ok, let me pick Forth in engineering embedded widgets.
> Programmers in that industry will come across dozens
> or hundreds of programs written in the language they use and not
> see anything written in Forth.
Er, um, almost everything that these professional Forth
programmers will see will be Forth. That is what they will do
for a living. Of course if we pick C then those looking for
C will spend little time looking for Forth and will see
very little or none of it. But it is insane to say that
I can pick 'any language' and there that they will not
see 'anything' written in Forth. That is just nuts.
The only people who will not see anything will be those
who keep their eyes closed, like yourself.
> If you tell them about something
> written in Forth from a company in New Zealand, or hiding in the
> special computer from the delivery company or used to control
> part of a telescope in outer space, they will not be very
> impressed,
From what I have seen, what you say about Forth does not
impress anyone except other Forth haters. You tell us that
you and your non-Forth programmer friends generally agree
that 'programming in Forth is just a bad thing.' So when
you have discussions like that with Forth haters you
should not expec them to be impressed with Forth in a
positive way. ;-)
> unless they live in New Zealand and are getting ready
> to ship their telescope to the earth satellite assembly center
> at TRW. If you tell them that Forth is used to run their washing
> machine or is the program in the computer that controls the fuel
> injector in their automobile, then they might be impressed. But
> we don't tell them that, do we? Maybe the Forth code is there
> but the programmer who wrote it is under a non-disclosure agreement.
If you tell them that their favorite consumer item at home works
so nicely because it is written in Forth, and that it is part of
the reason that the company is so successful they might be impressed.
But still, only a very small percentage of people will be interested
in programming regardless.
If they say, show me the code, give me the details, then you have
to give them a lesson on basic business. People who are making money
doing things right don't often want to give away the details that
give them the advantage over the competition. Most successful
Forth will fit into this catagory. So complain away about not
being a professional Forth programmer who works with this kind of
stuff and complain away about the low quality of hobbiest Forth.
> I'm on the side of those non-programmers you complain
> about.
I know. I called them moles because they act like enemy
agents, claiming to like Forth, but only repeating negative
sound-bites. Being non-programmers they really can't discuss
programming details so all they can discuss are either
sound-bites or their bizzare non-programming religious interest
in Forth.
> Forth is interesting in itself,
I appreciate that people have interest in almost everything
and that it is a good thing. People are intested in all aspects
of human existence, and Forth is a valid subject of interest.
> just written down, without a computer.
Forth those outside of programming there are social, psychological,
physiological, mental, language related, work related, theory
related, etc. views of a thing like a programming language that
will interest people. Just beware of those 'interested in it'
who also say that 'it is unreadable' 'it is undocumentable'
'programming in it is a bad thing' and that they know this
because they don't program in it. ;-)
> Its a machine readable version of symbolic
> logic. I once gave a talk about Forth to a home computer club
> when they couldn't get a computer running for me to use. I said
> no problem, I'll just use the blackboard. I showed them how
> Forth was a clear and simple way to get the computer to do
> something. They were impressed. The non-programmers learned a
> little about programming and the programmers expressed an
> interest in learning more about Forth.
>
> Someday I hope to impress programmers even more with a
> Forth application they can use or a free Forth system written in
> Forth instead of masm, that doesn't need to run under MS-Dos,
> and has a listing they can understand. After thirty years of the
> existence of Forth, that should be possible.
You gonna write it or are you just waiting and complaining?
Don't expect to learn to swim from someone who can't swim and
claims that swimming is impossible. They will want you to
drownd to prove their point that it was impossible to teach you
to swim.
Don't expect to learn Forth from a non-Forth programming, or
non-programming Forth hater. They are out to prove that you
can't learn it.
Best Wishes
m-coughlin
>
> m-coughlin <m-cou...@comcast.net> wrote in message news:<419BC670...@comcast.net>...
>
> > > I would assume that everyone in the group has applications
> > > written in Forth that they use. This is a Forth newsgroup.
> > > The point of programming languages is to program, to create
> > > programs, programs that people use. Most of us have dozens
> > > if not hundreds of them and many create more every day.
> >
> > I have one that I haven't used much lately since I have
> > been neglecting the computers it runs on. That application
> > is the open boot ROM in Sun computers. It is an application
> > that everyone has to use, but it is designed so well that
> > they don't know its there. As each version gets better it
> > becomes more unlikely that a computer owner would have to do
> > anything with it.
>
> I would not classify a bios or open boot rom as an application
> program, but rather as a component of an OS. One might argue
> that every component of an OS was written as an application by
> someone, but they are not used as applcitions, they are used
> as components of an OS. Calling bios call 10 with an argument
> of 2 an applcation is stretching things a bit just as calling
> open boot a user level application program is clearly not an
> example of an application program.
Instead of taking the time to study all of your long and
detailed reply, let me just write a short fast note about this
first part.
The open boot ROM in Sun (and maybe Apple) computers is the
most widely distributed Forth program/system/application in
existence. It is a full Forth system. It is also a Forth
application, bios and everything else in between. It is not
designed to be a Forth development system, but it still is. They
did not take out enough of Forth to make it something else.
I would definitely not call it a part of an operating system.
It is a whole operating system. A special purpose one to
initialize programmable chips, read from a disk drive or
network, start something else that can be more clearly seen to
be an operating system, and then go away. Of course you can
think of it as something else if you like. That is the nature
and power of Forth. It is also another example of how those who
know something about Forth can look at the same thing and see it
so differently.
Howard Lee Harkness
>Ok, there are about 50 computers in the average automobile today. Can you
>tell me the language *any* of them were programmed in? Or your washing
>machine? Or your VCR? Could be Forth, how would you know?
Maybe, maybe not. While I was at GM, I openly advocated the use of Forth. I
believe it was one of the reasons that they terminated my contract early. Most
of the stuff written at GM at that time was in 680x assembly. I heard that Ford
was using Forth, but I couldn't verify it. After a while, I even stopped
putting my Forth experience on my resume, because I got feedback that the
clients didn't want to hire a nut. That was around 1986.
That made it fairly hard for the guy that actually wanted a Forth programmer to
find me, but he did -- he found me at a FIG meeting, and I spent the next 6
years happily writing Forth for a semiconductor testing facility.
Unfortunately, they moved to Mexico to celebrate NAFTA, and I didn't want to go.
That was 10 years ago. I spoke to my old boss last year & he said they were
still using my software without a single modification, so I guess I managed to
work my way out of that job even if they hadn't moved to Mexico.
The local FIG group still meets 11 times a year here. Every 4th Thursday except
November & December; the last Fall meeting is in the 2nd week of December.
There are four of us left. Nowadays, we don't even talk about Forth at most of
the meetings. Clif had a stroke, and can't leave the house, so we meet at his
place, and discuss whatever interesting things happened to us that month. But
none of us write Forth anymore. Clif and Ed are retired, Bill has a gig writing
C/C++, and I sell insurance between programming contracts and teaching gigs.
The last two years have been particularly brutal.
--
Howard Lee Harkness
Peter Lawrence
.
.
.
> The local FIG group still meets 11 times a year here. Every 4th Thursday except
> November & December; the last Fall meeting is in the 2nd week of December.
> There are four of us left. Nowadays, we don't even talk about Forth at most of
> the meetings. Clif had a stroke, and can't leave the house, so we meet at his
> place, and discuss whatever interesting things happened to us that month. But
> none of us write Forth anymore. Clif and Ed are retired, Bill has a gig writing
> C/C++, and I sell insurance between programming contracts and teaching gigs.
Something similar applies to the Melbourne FIG - which I haven't got to for
around a year, though I am still emailing and being emailed occasionally.
>
> The last two years have been particularly brutal.
I think that applies no matter what the computer niche. The irony for me
personally is that I saw it coming decades ago and tried to diversify out of
computers, only to find I was already typecast. My efforts not only failed,
they also prevented me from making hay while the sun shone. PML.
--
GST+NPT=JOBS
I.e., a Goods and Services Tax (or almost any other broad based production
tax), with a Negative Payroll Tax, promotes employment.
See http://member.netlink.com.au/~peterl/publicns.html#AFRLET2 and the other
items on that page for some reasons why.
Howerd Oakford
< rant on >
"Howard Lee Harkness" <Cpp...@hostpci.com> wrote in message
news:lkftp0h0vb3t4dbvk...@4ax.com...
[snip]
> While I was at GM, I openly advocated the use of Forth. I
> believe it was one of the reasons that they terminated my contract early.
Most
> of the stuff written at GM at that time was in 680x assembly. I heard
that Ford
> was using Forth, but I couldn't verify it. After a while, I even stopped
> putting my Forth experience on my resume, because I got feedback that the
> clients didn't want to hire a nut. That was around 1986.
Somebody should study the psychology of Forth - it is a fascinating
phenomenon.
I never got as far as removing "Forth" from my CV, but I did split my work
experience into two files, one with C/C++ contracts ( usually at least 6
months to a year each ) and a few "big" Forth contracts, and the other the
rest of the "little" Forth projects. I did this because at job interviews I
was having to defend the fact that I had 8 to 10 contracts per year instead
of 2. It was automatically assumed that I had left the contracts early, as I
couldn't possibly have completed them in a few weeks.
About six months ago I was refused an interview for a contract which was an
_exact_ match for one that I had done 18 months previously. My agent was
perpelexed by this, so asked why, to be told that it was because I had spent
4 of the last 18 months on a Forth contract ( the ACE project that I did
with Stephen Pelc ). My agent, who knows nothing of the technical merits of
programming languages was very surprised by this.
At EuroForth in 1997, Stephen Pelc went some way to explaining these strange
reactions when he said that programming is a "division of the fashion
industry". Forth is not currently fashionable - its as simple as that.
Human society has unwritten rules. Take dress code - you can wear sandals
without socks ( on holiday for example ), but sandals with socks is not
approved of. Length of hair is more than a measure of how often you go to
the barbers, it makes a statement about your choice of lifestyle.
So, take a complex and subtle set of rules and throw in some unfashionable
behaviour and you are asking for trouble. I would not go for an interview in
sandals, and I try very hard not to mention that I prefer to finish projects
in weeks rather than months by using Forth ( if its a C contract ).
Given that Forth is not fashionable, if you run a company that programs
their widgets in Forth ( with good results ), would you advertise the fact?
So, Forth is not going to be fashionable if "nobody is using it". Its a
viscious circle....
Then there is quality of code. I have seen some terrible Forth code -
totally unreadable. I have seen some bad C code too, but its is difficult to
do the damage to a program in C that you can do with Forth.
I have seen Forth in the style of C ( long functions ), C++ ( lots of vector
tables ), assembler ( too many low-level words ).
Even a Forth in the style of BASIC, with one word per block, : RUN 600 900
THRU ; and a word called GOTO.
It is just too tempting to try out the latest progamming fashion in Forth.
I tried to sum up the negative aspects of Forth in "Forth And Not C" :
http://www.inventio.co.uk/forthnc.htm .
On the positive side, I have spent all but the first 18 months of my working
life programming in Forth, even on C contracts. I have balanced the need to
support my family ( with work near to home ), against the need to have fun
writing programs that are easy to read, work reliably and get finished
quickly. I have had to learn to tolerate an enormous amount of crap spoken
in the name of the latest fad in computer science.
One C contract, where my boss was more than usually tolerant of my Forth
habit, gave two examples of the power of Forth :
I had used Forth to develop a PPP analyser program ( in my spare time ),
which I then translated into C ( as far as was possible without a
multitasker ). There was a problem with some mobile phone software hanging
when it acccessed a Hungarian WAP site, so my boss asked me to investigate.
He jotted the WAP site's phone number, user ID and password on a piece of
paper, and I went to to my desk, typed them into one of the blocks which I
had configured to run scripts, pressed F8 and watched the PPP packets as the
connection was established. I noticed that when I sent an LCP close request,
the WAP site dropped the phone line without sending an LCP acknowledge. My
software didn't crash, it just waited for the non-existant packet and timed
out. Some two or three minutes later I went back to my boss and told him the
problem. He was visibly surprised at the speed!
The other example was a request from another department to filter out a
variable number of CHAP responses to check that the phone would retry the
correct number of times. It took about 90 minutes to construct a program to
do this from the building blocks that I had developed. Again, I got a very
positive response, especially as the company's own test software,
painstakingly written over 18 months could not do this. Although the company
was happy to let me use Forth to help in my own work, the Forth programs
could not be made "official" because Forth was not an officially approved
language in that company.
I get a real kick out of solving problems, and expressing the solution
elegantly. I like the power that Forth gives me to be in control of complex
systems. I feel very fortunate to have found Forth, and the rejection of my
opinions and psychological abuse that comes from even mentioning Forth in
mainstream progamming environments, is a small price to pay for such a
delightful language.
I have tried to sum up why Forth is so good in "Forth versus C" :
http://www.inventio.co.uk/forthvsc.htm
[snip]
> The last two years have been particularly brutal.
For me the worst time was when I realised that I had to program in C to make
a living ( about 1995 ). I started my first C-only contract with eager
anticipation that I would be working on a big project, rather than the
little 4 to 6 week embedded apps that I had been routinely churning out in
Forth.
The contract was estimated at 4 to 6 months. When I got there I was
horrified to learn that the application was exactly the sort of thing that I
used to do in 4 to 6 weeks. These days, I prototype in Forth, then translate
into C. I even have a program to help with this strange requirement to
obscure the structure of the program with a multitude of brackets and
semicolons.
< rant off >
To end on a more positve note, there are definitely moreForth programming
jobs around now than there have been for many years.
I think there are many reasons for this :
Several large, monolithic companies have failed, and the power of the
corporations at least in technical areas in somewhat less. Even Microsoft is
under attack.
There is more emphasis on demonstrable results with ISO 9001 etc. Managers
are actually trying to understand why major software projects fail.
Programming "methodologies" used to be used as a management tool to direct
failure at programmers : "we specified that the program was designed using
the Bloggs methodologiy - if it has failed it must be because the
programmers didn't follow the Bloggs methodologiy". I think people are
seeing through this now.
In the UK there has been a shake up of the permanent versus contractor tax
status, with contract rates falling and many contractors going permanent.
This has depleted the number of available contract programmers, and has
lessened ( slightly ) the advantage that C has in the quantity of
programmers.
There are now several Forths which are tailored to the current markets, with
Windows interfaces, OOP, optimising compilers etc.
The thing about Forth is that it was discovered, not invented. It doesn't
matter whether people recognise this or not, Forth stands on its own feet
without our help. Even if we all forget it, someone will discover it again.
And, yes, I know that it is not currently fashionable to make statements
like this!
Regards
Howerd ;)
Doug Hoffman
"Howerd Oakford" <howerd....@ntlworld.com> wrote:
> There are now several Forths which are tailored to the current markets, with
> Windows interfaces, OOP, optimising compilers etc.
Yes. I heard that there may be more than a couple of customers/users
out there who desire a windowing/GUI interface. And, chameleon-like,
Forth has adapted well to that. The speed achieved with optimising
compilers doesn't hurt either.
> The thing about Forth is that it was discovered, not invented. It doesn't
> matter whether people recognise this or not, Forth stands on its own feet
> without our help. Even if we all forget it, someone will discover it again.
Interesting statement.
> And, yes, I know that it is not currently fashionable to make statements
> like this!
Around here I think you're safe. Thanks for talking about your
experiences.
Regards,
-Doug
Jeff Fox
> Instead of taking the time to study all of your long and
> detailed reply, let me just write a short fast note about this
> first part.
I think many of you misconceptions come from your predispostion
to not bother to read, study or consider the detailed replies
that people give to your comments. You don't take the time to
even try, you complain that direct ansers to your question go off
into things that you can't understand and that you can't be
bothered to understand things.
And of course you can always back out of factually wrong
statements by simply redefining all the terms to your own
personal definitions. In the absence of what other people say
in your experience it is no wonder that you are confused about
so many aspects of Forth.
Best Wishes
Jeff Fox
>
> Somebody should study the psychology of Forth - it is a fascinating
> phenomenon.
I did a presentation yesterday on psychology and the
organization of brain activity in Forth. It is a subject that has
intereted me for some time.
> About six months ago I was refused an interview for a contract which was an
> _exact_ match for one that I had done 18 months previously. My agent was
> perpelexed by this, so asked why, to be told that it was because I had spent
> 4 of the last 18 months on a Forth contract ( the ACE project that I did
> with Stephen Pelc ). My agent, who knows nothing of the technical merits of
> programming languages was very surprised by this.
I have often described this as the green paint syndrome. You have lots
of experience painting houses. You apply for a job painting houses
and go to the job interview. After a while they get to the 'the critical
question'. 'What color did you paint the last house?'
"It was grey with blue trim."
'Sorry, we are looking for someone with experience painting
houses green.'
Of course when it comes to Forth, the situation is far worse.
There are many stories like that where the F word in someone's
experience was all it took to reject them. Such is the
reputation of Forth in many circles. Never underestimate the
number of Forth haters out there.
> At EuroForth in 1997, Stephen Pelc went some way to explaining these strange
> reactions when he said that programming is a "division of the fashion
> industry". Forth is not currently fashionable - its as simple as that.
And hasn't been fashionable for 25 years? Some fashions come back,
but ...
> Human society has unwritten rules. Take dress code - you can wear sandals
> without socks ( on holiday for example ), but sandals with socks is not
> approved of. Length of hair is more than a measure of how often you go to
> the barbers, it makes a statement about your choice of lifestyle.
> So, take a complex and subtle set of rules and throw in some unfashionable
> behaviour and you are asking for trouble. I would not go for an interview in
> sandals, and I try very hard not to mention that I prefer to finish projects
> in weeks rather than months by using Forth ( if its a C contract ).
What you are refering too is the pressure to conform to the mean,
the normal, the average or the standard behavior and to discourage
people coloring outside the lines. Being honest about prefering Forth
because of inproved productivity will just make things worse to
people who want to see that as proof of an irrational interest in Forth.
After all, weeks vs months must be irrational. If it were true then
Forth would have 'conquered the world.' (Of so we have been told
by our resident 'skeptics'.)
> Given that Forth is not fashionable, if you run a company that programs
> their widgets in Forth ( with good results ), would you advertise the fact?
> So, Forth is not going to be fashionable if "nobody is using it". Its a
> viscious circle....
We had a presentation yesterday about the use of Forth at Mosaic
Industries. As we were told about how they started out building their
own controllers for scientific instruments and ended up supplying
these controllers with Forth in ROM to many instrument manufacturers.
They told us how Forth is in this wide range of scientific instruments
that use their cards and software as modules.
As we heard about the advantages of Forth and the technical
reasons that it was a good fit, and the business reasons why
it was another successful niche for Forth I could not help but
imagine what response they would have had for reporting the
facts about their company in c.l.f. The 'skeptics' would
question if any of it was true and rant about how these were
more folks with irrational interest in Forth and would tell
others to reject what they reported about their business.
> Then there is quality of code. I have seen some terrible Forth code -
> totally unreadable. I have seen some bad C code too, but its is difficult to
> do the damage to a program in C that you can do with Forth.
The tradeoff in offering any freedom is the risk that it won't be
used responsibly. The only options are to restrict the freedom to
limit potential damage, and the loss of freedom is seem as the biggest
potential damage to some, or to have a person who knows that with
freedom comes responsibility.
And there is the fact that one more bad C program is not going to
be noticed, but one more bad Forth program is much more likely to
get noticed. Less Forth, and more people looking for examples of
bad Forth to prove that Forth is bad.
> I have seen Forth in the style of C ( long functions ), C++ ( lots of vector
> tables ), assembler ( too many low-level words ).
> Even a Forth in the style of BASIC, with one word per block, : RUN 600 900
> THRU ; and a word called GOTO.
> It is just too tempting to try out the latest progamming fashion in Forth.
People who do that generally don't know any better. It is not they gave
up good Forth style to try basic-Forth or Perl-Forth or whatever, they
just backed into Forth in the first place while still thinking in C or
Basic or whatever.
> I tried to sum up the negative aspects of Forth in "Forth And Not C" :
> http://www.inventio.co.uk/forthnc.htm .
It was quite amusing how it brought out the flamers.
> On the positive side, I have spent all but the first 18 months of my working
> life programming in Forth, even on C contracts. I have balanced the need to
> support my family ( with work near to home ), against the need to have fun
'The need to have fun' is completely foreign to many people who see
programming as a day to day production line type job. Programmers and
managers who think that way are going to be very suspicious of anyone
talking about a 'need to have fun' in programming.
> I get a real kick out of solving problems, and expressing the solution
> elegantly. I like the power that Forth gives me to be in control of complex
> systems. I feel very fortunate to have found Forth, and the rejection of my
> opinions and psychological abuse that comes from even mentioning Forth in
> mainstream progamming environments, is a small price to pay for such a
> delightful language.
"Getting a kick' 'elegant solutions' 'liking power to control' 'feeling
very fortunate' 'rejection of your opinions' 'psychological abuse
that comes from even mentioning Forth in mainstream programming
environments' 'delightful' ? All those phrases are suspect and
not just mostly meaningless to the mainstream, but proof that
Forth must not be about the job of programming.
> I have tried to sum up why Forth is so good in "Forth versus C" :
> http://www.inventio.co.uk/forthvsc.htm
The flamewar it launched was a classic. Show us the facts!
Show us the numbers! You haven't proven anything! You just talk
about all these warm fuzzy things like likes and dislikes and
esthetics and delights and being paranoid! :-)
Best Wishes
Anyway. Fashion is fun. And being unfashionable is also
fun for some.
Howard Lee Harkness
>'The need to have fun' is completely foreign to many people who see
>programming as a day to day production line type job. Programmers and
>managers who think that way are going to be very suspicious of anyone
>talking about a 'need to have fun' in programming.
There *is* a "need to have fun". Productivity soars when the technician is both
intellectually and emotionally engaged in the task at hand.
If you haven't read _Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience_ (Mihaly
Csikszentmihalyi), I highly recommend you do so. From the preface:
"TWENTY-THREE HUNDRED YEARS AGO Aristotle concluded that, more than anything
else, men and women seek happiness."
I believe that the primary reason many programmers choose this field is that
programming is a Flow activity.
--
Howard "Looking for an opportunity to write Forth for a living" Harkness
Paul E. Bennett
[%X]
> These days, I prototype in Forth, then
> translate into C.
I too have used Forth as the prototyping environment for resolving ideas
about a problem and to get a roughish solution, usually in equally obscure
languages specific to the equipment it is aimed at (like S80 and D3 for
instance). The main problem, of course, is that it takes longer to write a
document that describes the approach to resolving the problem than it did
to write the Forth prototype in the first place. However, such
documentation was always going to be needed at some level.
[%X]
> There is more emphasis on demonstrable results with ISO 9001 etc. Managers
> are actually trying to understand why major software projects fail.
> Programming "methodologies" used to be used as a management tool to direct
> failure at programmers : "we specified that the program was designed using
> the Bloggs methodologiy - if it has failed it must be because the
> programmers didn't follow the Bloggs methodologiy". I think people are
> seeing through this now.
Now that the fashion show with Methodologies is starting to settle down as
well. The various methodologies are still at the tail end of a fashion show
for many companies, especially in software development. However, there is a
good deal of retrospective research going on into the failures and
successes of system development. The "Keystone Functions" stuff I posted
recently was a brief overview of such research (and for which article I
haven't seen any responses yet).
> In the UK there has been a shake up of the permanent versus contractor tax
> status, with contract rates falling and many contractors going permanent.
The permanent staff benefits began to look extremely enticing. Especially
as I am allowed to use Forth in my work as well. I get no argument and have
even got a few people taking another look at it.
> The thing about Forth is that it was discovered, not invented. It doesn't
> matter whether people recognise this or not, Forth stands on its own feet
> without our help. Even if we all forget it, someone will discover it
> again. And, yes, I know that it is not currently fashionable to make
> statements like this!
I think everyone who gains benefit from using Forth has to discover it for
themselves. It is almost as though they will be invited to discover a lot
more about themselves too. Whoooo! that is sounding a bit like oriental
philosophy now. ;>
--
********************************************************************
Paul E. Bennett ....................<email://peb@a...>
Forth based HIDECS Consultancy .....<http://www.amleth.demon.co.uk/>
Mob: +44 (0)7811-639972 .........NOW AVAILABLE:- HIDECS COURSE......
Tel: +44 (0)1235-811095 .... see http://www.feabhas.com for details.
Going Forth Safely ..... EBA. www.electric-boat-association.org.uk..
********************************************************************
m-coughlin
[snip]
>
> What you are refering too is the pressure to conform to the
> mean, the normal, the average or the standard behavior and
> to discourage people coloring outside the lines. Being
> honest about prefering Forth because of inproved productivity
> will just make things worse to people who want to see that as
> proof of an irrational interest in Forth. After all, weeks vs
> months must be irrational. If it were true then Forth would
> have 'conquered the world.' (Of so we have been told
> by our resident 'skeptics'.)
I'm the one who mentions conquering the world. I'm not a
skeptic, I'm a Forth zealot. If Forth lets you program ten times
faster or more productively than another programming language,
then it will take over the world. But the main point of my
conjecture has been forgotten. I can see how Forth can let you
program ten times more productively, and since it has not taken
over the world, then I must conclude Forth programmers must be
doing other things eleven times less productively.
Howerd Oakford's essay at
http://www.inventio.co.uk/forthnc.htm
very clearly states the problems a manager would have to face in
deciding to use Forth but it shows little about Forth's
advantages. It is preaching to the converted. We need to find
ways to show Forth's advantages right out in front, in plane
text, instead of just looking for ways to write more code.
It used to be fashionable for Forth programmers to write
instructional books that could be sold in bookstores along with
all the other books on computers. What ever happened to that? Is
Forth out of fashion so such books woun't sell? Or has Forth
only been used lately for programs that nobody would want to
read about?
Elizabeth D. Rather
> ...
> It used to be fashionable for Forth programmers to write
> instructional books that could be sold in bookstores along with
> all the other books on computers. What ever happened to that? Is
> Forth out of fashion so such books woun't sell? Or has Forth
> only been used lately for programs that nobody would want to
> read about?
You have some fundamental misunderstanding about the way publishing works.
I have written books. I have talked to publishers about distributing them.
What they say is they are only interested in books that have a guaranteed
market of >100,000 copies, and based on that they will pay the author
~$0.50/copy. They will do only minimal promotion: list your book in their
distributors' catalogs and take orders. That would not put my book in any
bookstores, because the store owners won't have heard of it. Books that do
get into bookstores are ones (a)by authors the stores have heard of, or
(b)on topics the store is already selling lots of.
Meanwhile, the main outlet for non-mainstream publications is the internet.
By publishing my books myself and promoting them on the internet, I have
sold thousands of copies and made enough money to cover the production and
marketing costs (not to mention costs of improvements, which I've been able
to make -- the current copy of Forth Application Techniques is a lot better
than last years'). As a result, there are thousands more people who have
access to them than might have if I had attempted to go with a publisher.
John Passaniti
> Of course when it comes to Forth, the situation is far worse. There
> are many stories like that where the F word in someone's experience
> was all it took to reject them. Such is the reputation of Forth in
> many circles. Never underestimate the number of Forth haters out
> there.
The more I read things like this-- even after accounting for Jeff Fox's
usual use of hyperbole-- the more I wish we had a way to tie newsgroup
messages to physical location. Because the single biggest benefit I see
to these kinds of messages is they provide a list of places where I
would not like to work.
Maybe where I live-- Rochester, New York-- is some weird island in a
larger anti-Forth sea. But one thing I can say is that none of the
stupidity I'm reading matches my experience here. When I worked as an
independent consultant, I used Forth and nobody cared. No company I've
interviewed for ever reacted negatively to my experience with Forth-- in
fact it was always seen as a strength. None of the managers at the five
companies I've worked for have ever irrationally rejected my
recommendations to use Forth. None of the other Forth-advocating
software engineers I've worked/networked with have reported any
significant problems with getting management to allow the use of Forth.
I'm sorry, but at least here locally, the problems some people describe
regarding acceptance or "buy in" of Forth simply doesn't exist. At
least it doesn't exist for the embedded systems world I work in. And if
it doesn't exist here, I have no reason to believe there are other
places where Forth simply isn't a problem. In fact, there are probably
lots of places.
So here's my suggestion: If you have a story to tell regarding the
acceptance of Forth-- good or bad-- please take the time to note where
this physically happened. Someone can then compile it together and
provide a handy map.
I'll start:
Forth: Not a problem here at latitude 43.1533, longitude -77.6047.
Dr. Bruce R. McFarling
> I would definitely not call it a part of an operating system.
> It is a whole operating system. A special purpose one to
> initialize programmable chips, read from a disk drive or
> network, start something else that can be more clearly seen to
> be an operating system, and then go away. Of course you can
> think of it as something else if you like. That is the nature
> and power of Forth. It is also another example of how those who
> know something about Forth can look at the same thing and see it
> so differently.
If the buyer buys the system to run programs that run on that
"something else that can be more clearly seen to be an operating
system", and this "specialised operating system", if you prefer,
is part of the process of starting that something else up, then
it is part of the system of operating the computer. To "definitely
not call it" a part of that computer's operating system is just
semantic quibbling.
A system is a set of related parts. "boot, hand over" is a
relationship. Ergo, it is part of the operating system, or if
you prefer the "operational" system.
The fact that it is a specialised operating system in its own
right is just good system design once an operational system
reaches a certain complexity. As I look at the evolution of
bootloaders from short segments of code that load a specific
sector off a hard drive to what they are becoming, that move
toward a specialised free standing operating system seems
to be a definite trend.
Jorge Acereda
> "Howerd Oakford" <howerd....@ntlworld.com> wrote in message news:<6VSnd.255$QL1...@newsfe3-gui.ntli.net>...
> > I have tried to sum up why Forth is so good in "Forth versus C" :
> > http://www.inventio.co.uk/forthvsc.htm
>
> The flamewar it launched was a classic. Show us the facts!
> Show us the numbers! You haven't proven anything! You just talk
> about all these warm fuzzy things like likes and dislikes and
> esthetics and delights and being paranoid! :-)
Don't blame him, yo do it all the time ;-)
Anton Ertl
> C/Unix and BSD have written standards, but they don't
>count. Instead of writing standards, C/Unix programmers just
>try to do the same thing.
I must have been dreaming when I saw the ANSI C standards (C89 and
C99) and the various Unix standards (e.g., SVID2, SVID3, XPG/3, XPG/4,
Unix95, Unix98, SUSv2, SUSv3, and the various Posix standards (some of
these are different names for the same standard)), and used them when
programming.
But no, I was not dreaming. It's just like in Forth: By writing
standards, C and Unix implementors try to ensure that they do the same
thing.
- anton
--
M. Anton Ertl http://www.complang.tuwien.ac.at/anton/home.html
comp.lang.forth FAQs: http://www.complang.tuwien.ac.at/forth/faq/toc.html
EuroForth 2004: http://www.complang.tuwien.ac.at/anton/euroforth2004/
Deadline (abstracts, regist.): Oct 31, 2004; Conference: November 19-21, 2004
Jeff Fox
> I'm the one who mentions conquering the world.
Yes, and of course it was reference to one of the many
anti-Forth sound-bites that you regularly post. The one
about the efficiency in Forth must be false advertizing
because if it were true Forth would have taken over the
world.
You are an odd case. You call yourself a Forth religious
zealot, but mostly use that as an insult and as a way
to embarras Forth programmers and people who actually
use Forth or know something about it. You call yourself
someone who promotes Forth, but then you tell us what
you tell other people and the positive statements are
usually left-handed insults and just setups for whole
list of familiar anti-Forth sound-bytes. You tell
people that Forth is unreadable, etc. more than
anyone I know. Labeling yourself and others as Forth
zealots lets you insult Forth coming and going.
> I'm not a
> skeptic, I'm a Forth zealot.
I agree that you are not a skeptic. I refered to people
who call themselves skeptics, and say that they are skeptical.
They say that they need to reserve judgment and examine the
evidence but in fact have actually made up their minds
and are really pseudo-skeptics.
Then there are some people who label themselves as 'fans'
of Forth but use the forum primarily to insult the language
and repeat meaningless negative sound-bites about Forth.
> If Forth lets you program ten times
> faster or more productively than another programming language,
> then it will take over the world.
Case in point. You have just called people who actually use
Forth, and honestly report productivity gains liars by saying
again that if what they say were true thatt Forth would have
taken over the world. You have not only a profoundly nieve
ivory tower view of computing but a habit of repeating
anti-Forth sound-bites and refusing to bother to read
what people in the know, people who actually use Forth,
tell you.
> But the main point of my conjecture has been forgotten.
> I can see how Forth can let you program ten times more
> productively, and since it has not taken
> over the world, then I must conclude Forth programmers must be
> doing other things eleven times less productively.
That's the sort of bizare mental association that passes for
logic in your mind. You might as well conclude that since
pink elephants have failed to take over the world that your
method of drinking to keep them away is still working.
> Howerd Oakford's essay at
> http://www.inventio.co.uk/forthnc.htm
> very clearly states the problems a manager would have to face in
> deciding to use Forth but it shows little about Forth's
> advantages. It is preaching to the converted. We need to find
> ways to show Forth's advantages right out in front, in plane
> text, instead of just looking for ways to write more code.
>
> It used to be fashionable for Forth programmers to write
> instructional books that could be sold in bookstores along with
> all the other books on computers. What ever happened to that? Is
> Forth out of fashion so such books woun't sell? Or has Forth
> only been used lately for programs that nobody would want to
> read about?
What happened was that many years ago you decided to refuse to
look at or acknowledge the exsitence of documentation. So when
people give you URLs and books and articles you say that you
can't bother to read them and then come back a couple of months
later with more of your lies that no documenation exists.
It is true that no documenation makes it through to your brain
and therefor you can't see that it exists. But that is simply
because you filter it out then repeat the anti-Forth lies in
public again that it simly doesn't exist. Pretending to be
an overly zealous Forth nut who knows nothing about Forth
does provide you with a forum for repeating and repeating
all those false anti-Forth sound-bites that you love to
repeat. You are not the only person who finds being an
anti-Forth religious zealot to be an entertaining hobby.
Best Wishes
Best Wishes
Jeff Fox
> "m-coughlin" <m-cou...@comcast.net> wrote in message
> news:41A1100A...@comcast.net...
> > ...
> > It used to be fashionable for Forth programmers to write
> > instructional books that could be sold in bookstores along with
> > all the other books on computers. What ever happened to that? Is
> > Forth out of fashion so such books woun't sell? Or has Forth
> > only been used lately for programs that nobody would want to
> > read about?
>
> You have some fundamental misunderstanding about the way publishing works.
No. He has been corrected on these things so many times that all
we can do is conclude that he enjoys making false statements and
repeating his favorite anti-Forth sound-bites. He isn't going to
listen this time either. He can't be bothered with facts.
> I have written books.
How many times has he been told? How many dozens and dozens of
books has he been told about? Has he ever bothered to read any
of those replies? We can't tell. They don't get through. Next
month he will reopen the thread and repeat that you are
incapable of doing documenation or writing books.
You are probably just reinserting the facts again as you always
do when Michael posts the false statements such as those that
no books exist. And you problably know that Michael is not
listening, so you are probably just doing damage control and
trying to deal with Michaels hobby of ignoring the facts and
returning over and over to repeat the falsehoods about Forth.
Best Wishes
Jeff Fox
Nor is it a problem in Podunk. In places like Silicon Valley it
has been reported that mentioning the word Forth has set hundreds
of C programmings into booing, jeering and making cat calls. I
don't believe that Mitch Bradley was lying about that. I have
seen too many similar instances.
Of course in my visits to Podunk Iowa I never say any large
groups of C programmers complaining about Forth. I suppose I
could have concluded that it was therefore impossible that
a place like Silicon Valley might be different in any way. ;-)
Best Wishes
Having children with your sister is not seen as a problem in
some parts of the US either. I suppose that some people there
would have reason to believe that it would be seen as a
problem anywhere else either. And after all, some people
see usenet as a sort of Jerry Springer show where they can
advocate gay group sex in computer language forums etc. ;-)
Astrobe
> I'll start:
>
> Forth: Not a problem here at latitude 43.1533, longitude -77.6047.
With each place it's plague. :) ;) :)
Amicalement,
Astrobe
John Passaniti
> Nor is it a problem in Podunk. In places like Silicon Valley it has
> been reported that mentioning the word Forth has set hundreds of C
> programmings into booing, jeering and making cat calls. I don't
> believe that Mitch Bradley was lying about that. I have seen too
> many similar instances.
I know nothing about Podunk, Iowa other than the city I live in is
larger, has a very rich engineering and entrepreneurial history, and
most relevant for people considering places to work, no fear or dread of
Forth.
I've never been to Silicon Valley, but it doesn't sound like the kind
place I or any Forth programmer would want to be, at least according to
the way you and others paint it. You really have had hundreds of C
programmers boo, jeer, and make cat calls over Forth? Wow, if I found
myself in such an environment, I'd move. Must be the weather is nice.
> Having children with your sister is not seen as a problem in some
> parts of the US either. I suppose that some people there would have
> reason to believe that it would be seen as a problem anywhere else
> either. And after all, some people see usenet as a sort of Jerry
> Springer show where they can advocate gay group sex in computer
> language forums etc. ;-)
Your oblique references to my sexuality continue to fascinate me-- you
continue to bring it up even in messages like this where it isn't even
remotely relevant. Honestly Jeff, get some therapy.
Stonelock
> news:41A1100A...@comcast.net...
> > ...
> > It used to be fashionable for Forth programmers to write
> > instructional books that could be sold in bookstores along with
> > all the other books on computers. What ever happened to that? Is
> > Forth out of fashion so such books woun't sell? Or has Forth
> > only been used lately for programs that nobody would want to
> > read about?
>
> You have some fundamental misunderstanding about the way publishing works.
Give people a break Elizabeth. You do not detain the panacea. Most of
his post was interresting enough. It was to me anyways and I'm sure it
was to others also. You don't have to feel the need to rub in people's
faces everything you can dig up. Maybe you're good at whatever it is
that you do well, but you clearly lack insight in other areas.
Can't you be more diplomatic? Nobody likes to get bombed the way you
seem to enjoy doing.
If anything, you should bomb your own self about your very own
diplomacy skill.
> I have written books.
Congratulations.
[snip]
Stonelock