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

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rickman wrote:

> On 4/17/2013 2:00 PM, Bernd Paysan wrote:
> Is it possible that the emperor wears no clothes?  How do we know that
> Forth can make arbitrary teams of programmers more productive or more
> importantly, save a company money.  The two are not necessarily linked.
>   There are more to the costs of a company than how much it costs to
> create a line of code.

I've met people with various levels of experience during my carreer, and one 
way or another was supposed to teach them Forth, so that they could get 
going on the stuff I - the obnoxious Forth guy - was doing.  The worst thing 
the bosses imagined happened: They became preachers of this "religion"!  The 
last one was the guy who had to take over my project when I left the 
company.  Before I left, this was something management allowed me, the weird 
unmanageable guy to do, but for sure, nobody sane in the company would bet 
on this, and rather use an ARM Cortex M0 and C, so I thought they would 
quickly abandond this approach when I left.  They didn't, they had a product 
to finish, so they had to assign a guy to maintain my code.  And he did, and 
the result was completely different: They thought about adding a lot more 
code to the program, doing other stuff as well (something I had suggested 
before, but that was frowned upon).

One boss, used to my performance in Forth, thought they were struggling 
hard, and pretty slow.  They themselves were convinced that their task was 
much easier with Forth than it was with the tools they had used before.

What you need for newbies to be successful is some code base they can read, 
and some expert they can ask, for basic design patterns.  We know that 
people who come to Forth without exposure to the coding culture produce 
really really bad code.  Forth is more than just RPN, and it needs teaching, 
as it is significantly different from the mainstream programming languages.

I'm not sure what to say about academia.  IMHO, academia is too often an 
emperor with no clothes, especially the school-style academia which offers 
you some courses in mainstream technology, but no deeper insight.  The 
current people coming out of academia and getting a job at Google or so are 
easy to observe: Their code is open source.  It's these accumulated layers 
of abstractions that they got taught in academia, and which causes software 
to become a maintenance nightmare bloat.  Google wants to drop 4.5 million 
lines of code from Chrome now, just by removing a few abstraction layers... 
they won't even touch any code that does real work.

There are of course people who will not like Forth at all.  Some people like 
complexity for its own sake.  IIRC, Anton Ertl's boss says that Forth is not 
even a real language, as it lacks one important property of a language: 
grammar.  This is like saying that Chinese is not a real language or so, 
because it lacks the typical grammar rules you are used from Latin.  Now, no 
serious linguist would say that, because Chinese is the most popular 
language by native speakers - but they really invented some sort of Chinese 
"grammar" which actually doesn't exist, just to fit this language in their 
system of grammar rules derived from Latin.

BTW Chinese people: I sometimes get mails from them, e.g. one guy in a 
Shanghai university discovered my b16.  He didn't know about literate 
programming, he didn't know about Forth, he was doing an FPGA project, and 
by doing so, found some links to my processor.  He was pretty angry about 
his university that they don't teach all that, because he thought that was 
cool stuff.  Literate programming comes from a certain Stanford professor, 
who is very, very difficult to ignore in computer science; though I have 
found people in the bay area, programming computers, who didn't know who 
Donald Who? was... and Microsoft Word is the only program for technical 
documents...

Many of the success stories we know about Forth became success stories 
because one lonely guy could do things hordes of engineers couldn't with 
their traditional approaches, and it was important for the company to get 
things going.  Think of Open Firmware.  Of course, Sun developed SPARC for 
Unix, and it was used for Unix.  But they Unix guys couldn't boot their 
system, they couldn't even debug it, and they shifted the blame over to the 
hardware guys, who couldn't prove them wrong, apart from one observation: 
Mitch Bradley's Forth did run on a fresh SPARC prototype mainboard...

You can't say that all these C guys at Sun were stupid idiots.  That's not 
the explanation why they failed, or rather: why they were so slow.

-- 
Bernd Paysan
"If you want it done right, you have to do it yourself"
http://bernd-paysan.de/

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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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