Path: csiph.com!usenet.pasdenom.info!weretis.net!feeder4.news.weretis.net!ecngs!feeder2.ecngs.de!newsfeed.freenet.ag!news2.euro.net!postnews2.euro.net!news.wanadoo.nl!not-for-mail From: mhx@iae.nl (Marcel Hendrix) Subject: Re: Forth as a polarising language Newsgroups: comp.lang.forth Message-ID: <01699395948435@frunobulax.edu> Date: Sat, 8 Sep 2012 10:34:02 +0200 References: <42098575.CBZ8BYJVEi@sunwukong.fritz.box> X-Newsreader: iForth 2.0 console (October 21, 2006) Lines: 35 Organization: Wanadoo NNTP-Posting-Date: 08 Sep 2012 08:33:32 GMT NNTP-Posting-Host: s529d937f.adsl.wanadoo.nl X-Trace: 1347093212 dr1.euro.net 53090 82.157.147.127:65445 X-Complaints-To: abuse@wanadoo.nl Xref: csiph.com comp.lang.forth:15521 Bernd Paysan writes Re: Forth as a polarising language [..] > With the Forth OOP extensions, we also see the Blub paradox. We have > more than 20 different OOP extensions to Forth, and most of them are the > greatest thing than sliced bread for their author, and nothing but weird > for everybody else. Does this illustrate the Blub paradox accurately? Anyway, it is an interesting example. > And the fact is that most of them are rather > rudimentary, even though the authors don't want to acknowledge. As you are the author of, IIRC, 2 or 3 of these 20 OOP extensions, your last remark is the perfect Blub illustration :-) I have been interested in FOOP ever since Dick Pountain wrote his BYTE articles (30 years ago?). However, in all that time I have *never* seen an interesting Forth program that uses (needed to use) OOP. All we get is the same old trivial examples. My own experiments were all failures: in their final version the FOOP proved to make for unreadable (i.e. too much looking up to do) and unmaintainable code. All that withstood time is structure words and a numeric array package. At least your heap/heap1 code is easy to understand and interesting, but Mini-OOF results in a ridiculous 7..50 times slowdown. In my opinion the problem is not that FOOP creators think their particular version is the greatest thing since sliced bread, but that they are not able to convince others that this is indeed the case. At least not by example. -marcel