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Re: i finally get the messes caused by re using code

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On Wednesday, April 17, 2013 7:00:31 PM UTC+1, Bernd Paysan wrote:
>
> The problem with Forth is more that small companies who started with Forth 
> and grow well often stop using it when they have grown big enough to afford 
> more traditional style - then the Forth guys can please either leave or use 
> the "standard" tools, as growth involves hiring managers from outside, and 
> often even whole teams from former competing big companies, which have 
> folded down due to the new competitor.  The employees looking for a new job 
> bring their old culture with them, which caused the failure of the big 
> company.
> 
> If the small companies would still use Forth after growing up, we already 
> would have "won".
> 

I agree with this.  

I think another, perhaps more challenging problem, is exposure and education.

Universities have two challenges: on the one hand they are to teach a discipline, on the other hand, there is the pressure to make it relevant to modern practices (so called 'best practice') so that 18 year olds who don't know any better feel like their education prepared them at least reasonably well for a job.  ('Best practice' ends up being tyranny of the establishment, which disadvantages a language like Forth.)

So a professor of computer science who wishes to teach algorithms and data structures will at some point need to get his students to practice implementations.  What language should she use?

It used to be C.  Then it became Java.  Now it is often Python.  But would it ever be Forth?  Doubtful.

So if from the university period, all of the graduates have never heard of Forth, never used it, and go into their first, second, or third jobs and never hear of it, then there is a very tiny pool of increasingly older people for whom Forth knowledge means power.

Add in the fact that grants to Universities / Academics from the Established Companies (M*****ft, etc.) often come with explicit or implicit stipulations on infrastructure choice (OS, etc.) or, even more difficult, large 'gifts' of expensive compilers or computers.  

When it comes to graduate / post-graduate education, research professors often receive funding for investigations that are of most interest to the Established Companies.

So we have a situation where the next generation of programmers *and* academics are both unfamiliar with Forth and dis-incentivised to investigate it.

(The problem here is that Universities have become much more heavily reliant on Corporate funding as the Government's coffers and ability to spend has come under pressure due to reasons we all are quite familiar with.  So it is increasingly harder for academics to ignore the established practices and strike out in directions that not at least implicitly supported by the Established order.)  (Djikstra wrote eloquently about this -- I should find the articles.)

From a personal perspective, I only happened to stumble across Forth during some side-line investigations into MMIX and Knuth's work on algorithms, and indeed only pursued the link because I happened to have a former boss (from the aerospace industry) who used to swear by Forth.

He would assert that if we were Forth literate we would be able to develop so much more quickly (we were building tiny, low-power, autonomous underwater micro-bots and implementing the algorithms and navigation software as embedded systems).  

He would quote productivity increases of 50 times, etc.  I remember both myself and most of my colleagues thinking at the time that this seemed preposterous and that he must surely be looking at his past through rosy coloured glasses -- "back in the day, when men hurled boulders", etc.

Sadly, without interest from any of us who were designing and implementing the algorithms, Forth never went anywhere.  There was just one consultant on the team, who was easily 15-20 years older than the rest of us, who agreed with the boss.  But of course, one consultant's opinion against 5 reasonably smart employees... suffice to say Forth wasn't the language we used.  (It was C.)

Now in hindsight, I think the boss *was absolutely* correct, except for the fact that your easily available "smart good hire" had probably never heard of Forth.

The fact that even after two technical degrees and jobs that intersected with embedded systems, I had never heard of Forth is disappointming (so many years in which I worked with sub-optimal tools).  (Of course, Lisp was well known from academica, but Forth is not mentioned.)

So, somehow, I fear that the problem for Forth is that it is given litle 'oxygen', gets no 'airplay', etc.  

And without exposure, well, linguistic anthropology has plenty of examples of how once vibrant languages die once the rate of new speakers is not enough to build proficiency faster than the rate at which proficient speakers die.

Can anything be done about that?  Can academics be converted?

AKE

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i finally get the messes caused by re using code the_gavino_himself <visphatesjava@gmail.com> - 2013-04-16 17:22 -0700
  Re: i finally get the messes caused by re using code Mark Wills <markrobertwills@yahoo.co.uk> - 2013-04-16 23:47 -0700
    Re: i finally get the messes caused by re using code Zbiggy <zbigniew2011REMOVE@gmail.REMOVE.com> - 2013-04-17 12:26 +0000
      Re: i finally get the messes caused by re using code albert@spenarnc.xs4all.nl (Albert van der Horst) - 2013-04-17 15:34 +0000
        Re: i finally get the messes caused by re using code Zbiggy <zbigniew2011REMOVE@gmail.REMOVE.com> - 2013-04-17 16:41 +0000
      Re: i finally get the messes caused by re using code Jason Damisch <jasondamisch@yahoo.com> - 2013-04-17 10:21 -0700
        Re: i finally get the messes caused by re using code Bernd Paysan <bernd.paysan@gmx.de> - 2013-04-17 20:00 +0200
          Re: i finally get the messes caused by re using code AKE <assadebrahim2000@gmail.com> - 2013-04-17 11:34 -0700
            Re: ... Can anything be done about that? Matthias Koch <matthias.koch@hot.uni-hannover.de> - 2013-04-25 14:06 +0200
              Re: ... Can anything be done about that? AKE <assadebrahim2000@gmail.com> - 2013-04-25 07:28 -0700
                Re: ... Can anything be done about that? AKE <assadebrahim2000@gmail.com> - 2013-04-25 12:13 -0700
                Re: ... Can anything be done about that? Matthias Koch <matthias.koch@hot.uni-hannover.de> - 2013-04-26 16:21 +0200
                Re: ... Can anything be done about that? AKE <assadebrahim2000@gmail.com> - 2013-04-27 06:36 -0700
          Re: i finally get the messes caused by re using code rickman <gnuarm@gmail.com> - 2013-04-17 15:49 -0400
            Re: i finally get the messes caused by re using code Bernd Paysan <bernd.paysan@gmx.de> - 2013-04-18 00:06 +0200
              Re: i finally get the messes caused by re using code Brad Eckert <hwfwguy@gmail.com> - 2013-04-18 09:09 -0700
                Re: i finally get the messes caused by re using code stephenXXX@mpeforth.com (Stephen Pelc) - 2013-04-18 20:20 +0000
                Re: i finally get the messes caused by re using code Brad Eckert <hwfwguy@gmail.com> - 2013-04-19 12:21 -0700
              Re: i finally get the messes caused by re using code mhx@iae.nl - 2013-04-21 00:13 -0700
                Re: i finally get the messes caused by re using code stephenXXX@mpeforth.com (Stephen Pelc) - 2013-04-21 12:55 +0000
                Re: i finally get the messes caused by re using code Roelf Toxopeus <rt4all@notthis.hetnet.nl> - 2013-04-21 22:37 +0200
                Re: i finally get the messes caused by re using code stephenXXX@mpeforth.com (Stephen Pelc) - 2013-04-22 11:09 +0000
                Re: i finally get the messes caused by re using code "Ed" <invalid@nospam.com> - 2013-04-24 21:09 +1000
            Re: i finally get the messes caused by re using code Hannu Vuolasaho <hannu.vuolasaho@nospam.tut.fi.invalid> - 2013-04-19 15:35 +0000
      Re: i finally get the messes caused by re using code Brad Eckert <hwfwguy@gmail.com> - 2013-04-17 10:51 -0700
        Re: i finally get the messes caused by re using code Zbiggy <zbigniew2011REMOVE@gmail.REMOVE.com> - 2013-04-17 18:08 +0000
          Re: i finally get the messes caused by re using code Brad Eckert <hwfwguy@gmail.com> - 2013-04-17 12:29 -0700
        Re: i finally get the messes caused by re using code Hugh Aguilar <hughaguilar96@yahoo.com> - 2013-04-20 22:33 -0700
          Re: i finally get the messes caused by re using code the_gavino_himself <visphatesjava@gmail.com> - 2013-04-20 23:39 -0700
            Re: i finally get the messes caused by re using code Elizabeth D Rather <erather@forth.com> - 2013-04-20 21:07 -1000
              Re: i finally get the messes caused by re using code Bernd Paysan <bernd.paysan@gmx.de> - 2013-04-22 19:13 +0200
                Re: i finally get the messes caused by re using code the_gavino_himself <visphatesjava@gmail.com> - 2013-04-26 14:57 -0700
                Re: i finally get the messes caused by re using code Bernd Paysan <bernd.paysan@gmx.de> - 2013-04-27 00:52 +0200
            Re: i finally get the messes caused by re using code marko <marko@marko.marko> - 2013-04-21 19:14 +1000
              Re: i finally get the messes caused by re using code AKE <assadebrahim2000@gmail.com> - 2013-04-21 05:09 -0700
                Re: i finally get the messes caused by re using code marko <marko@marko.marko> - 2013-04-21 22:53 +1000
                Re: i finally get the messes caused by re using code AKE <assadebrahim2000@gmail.com> - 2013-04-21 15:35 -0700
                Re: i finally get the messes caused by re using code Paul Rubin <no.email@nospam.invalid> - 2013-04-21 16:54 -0700
                Re: i finally get the messes caused by re using code marko <marko@marko.marko> - 2013-04-22 15:39 +1000
                Re: i finally get the messes caused by re using code anton@mips.complang.tuwien.ac.at (Anton Ertl) - 2013-04-22 10:40 +0000
                Re: i finally get the messes caused by re using code AKE <assadebrahim2000@gmail.com> - 2013-04-22 04:27 -0700
                Re: i finally get the messes caused by re using code m.a.m.hendrix@tue.nl - 2013-04-22 05:51 -0700
                Re: i finally get the messes caused by re using code Alex McDonald <blog@rivadpm.com> - 2013-04-22 08:55 -0700
                Re: i finally get the messes caused by re using code anton@mips.complang.tuwien.ac.at (Anton Ertl) - 2013-04-22 15:32 +0000
                Re: i finally get the messes caused by re using code daveyrotten <danw8804@gmail.com> - 2013-04-22 07:27 -0700
                Re: i finally get the messes caused by re using code Andrew Haley <andrew29@littlepinkcloud.invalid> - 2013-04-22 11:28 -0500
                Re: i finally get the messes caused by re using code anton@mips.complang.tuwien.ac.at (Anton Ertl) - 2013-04-23 12:03 +0000
                Re: i finally get the messes caused by re using code Paul Rubin <no.email@nospam.invalid> - 2013-04-23 23:46 -0700
                Re: i finally get the messes caused by re using code anton@mips.complang.tuwien.ac.at (Anton Ertl) - 2013-04-24 12:16 +0000
                Re: i finally get the messes caused by re using code AKE <assadebrahim2000@gmail.com> - 2013-04-24 06:08 -0700
            Re: i finally get the messes caused by re using code marko <marko@marko.marko> - 2013-04-21 19:28 +1000

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