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From: "Rod Pemberton" <dont_use_email@nohavenotit.com>
Newsgroups: comp.lang.forth
Subject: Re: Forth for education
Date: Wed, 25 Sep 2013 04:25:29 -0400
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On Mon, 23 Sep 2013 14:13:49 -0400, Elizabeth D. Rather  
<erather@forth.com> wrote:

> On 9/22/13 6:22 PM, Whammo wrote:
>> On Sunday, September 22, 2013 7:00:18 PM UTC-7, hughag...@yahoo.com  
>> wrote:

>> <Forth is quite dead now --- and has been dead for over 20 years.
>>
>>   The electric car was said to be dead for over 40 years.
>>   If anything, Forth is a sleeping giant.
>>   Minimal instruction sets computing is the future.
>>   Libraries of code, bloatware, and operating systems are 50's thinking.
>>   Small, modular hardware that operates in parallel only when needed,  
>> means speed and efficiency.
>>   The technology is there, but the people making the decisions want  
>> smart computers/compilers and dumb programmers.
>>   Let computers do what they're good at- repetition, and let people  
>> resolve the special cases.
>
> The "death of Forth" is wildly exaggerated. Just yesterday I received  
> this note from Leon Wagner:
>
> "Just ended a really good week at NASA. [...]

Unfortunately, NASA is a conundrum.  You'd like to think their
employees are brilliant, and just when you've accepted that they
truly are, they do dumb shit in front of you, like fire off a
rocket with a rubber seal in cold whether, or use pure oxygen
around electrical equipment, and implement a very wide range
of software errors like wrong units, incorrect formulas,
overwritten memory locations, arithmetic overflow,
and out-of-memory errors, etc.  If they make such mistakes,
how can we be certain their decision to use Forth is sound?


Rod Pemberton