John Passaniti wrote:
> 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.
Most programmers I've known just do programming. But lots of others do
programming.
>
> 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.
You misunderstand what I'm trying to say. To me, a "programmer" is a
narrow specialist by choice. It's like being a writer. But lots of
people write without being "writers", and lots of people program without
being "programmers". Forth was once the language for those.
>
> 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.
Yes, I understand how that can be. I've commented before here that
Mathematica programming has much in common with Forth programming. And
long ago someone at MIT surprised me by claiming that Forth is similar
to Lisp. But if you look from the right angle...
>
> 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.
Pretty good. When I was at MIT I found it very difficult to find
professionals of that quality to hire: the salary structure wasn't
adequate, I think. Did you hire him?
>
> 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.
--
John Doty, Noqsi Aerospace, Ltd.
http://www.noqsi.com/
--
Specialization is for robots.
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