Re: advantages of forth over other languages

John Doty wrote:
> Was Forth ever widely understood by programmers? Most Forthers I've 
> actually known have been scientists or engineers.

That old theme again.  You must come from that generation where people 
were specialists and stayed in their narrowly-defined roles for their 
entire career.  I'm glad I don't, and I'm glad the vast majority of the 
people I work with don't.  Maybe in your industry people are strictly 
defined by "programmer" and "scientist" and "engineer."  But most people 
I know are hyphenated-- they may primarily be a scientist, but they also 
have strong programming skills.  Or they might be an electrical 
engineer, but also be conversant in the world of programming.  I started 
the other way, starting off as a programmer and moving more towards 
electrical engineering.

But this is nothing new-- we've talked about this before, and I've been 
deeply thankful that the kind of regimented professional roles you seem 
to observe in your work don't apply universally.

Regarding knowing Forth, it may be a geographic thing, but here in 
Rochester, New York, it's hard to talk to a local experienced programmer 
who doesn't know about Forth.  They may not be actively using it 
professionally, but they know Forth.

I also have seen programmers who know Forth without... knowing Forth. 
Most of the recent graduates may not know the syntax, common idioms, and 
best practices of Forth, but they certainly understand the components 
that make up Forth, understand how it works, and can appreciate the 
essential qualities of it.  This comes out in various ways; I see it 
most often in job interviews.

My company currently has a position open and I usually conduct technical 
interviews for software engineers.  One of the questions I often ask 
during such interviews is what languages the candidate knows.  The point 
of the question is to determine the breadth of the candidate.  If for 
example they answer "C, Pascal, BASIC" then I know they are probably 
only conversant in imperative, procedural ALGOL-esque languages.  If 
they answer "C, Lisp, Smalltalk, Haskell, Java, Prolog" that says 
something completely different.  And if they toss in VHDL or Verilog in 
there, it at least suggests even more.  Further questions then might go 
into how deeply they know these languages.

The candidate I interviewed had a good grasp of both procedural and 
functional languages, and so I asked if he knew Forth.  He stated he 
didn't, but was interested.  So I gave a brief overview and then turned 
it around-- I asked him to describe the essential qualities of Forth 
based on what I just described.  He got the major themes:  imperative, 
procedural, deals with raw addresses so probably low abstraction levels, 
dictionary and interpreter means interactive and extensible, untyped, 
and so on.

Obviously, this doesn't mean he could sit down and start writing Forth 
code.  But it does mean that if properly introduced, he wouldn't have a 
problem picking it up and eventually being proficient in it.