Re: advantages of forth over other languages

Elizabeth D Rather <eratherXXX@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:

>John Doty wrote:
>> 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.
>
>I believe you use the term "programmer" rather differently from the way 
>John and I and most others here do.  Certainly my experience is the same 
>as John's: most of our customers (and, indeed, our staff as well) are 
>people with significant expertise in other fields (typically various 
>fields of science and engineering, including related skills such as 
>design of electronic components) who also do a lot of programming.  In 
>fact, I don't know *any* programmers who are narrow specialists or write 
>software without understanding the application domain in which it will 
>be used.
>
>Cheers,
>Elizabeth
As I see it a programmer is an interpreter. He interpretes one 'language'
(either another programming language or a thought given in mathematial or
tehnical terms) into the needed programming language.
It is said that a good intepreter needs to have a good knowledge in the
language from he interpretes and an even better knowledge in the language
into he interpretes.
This gives that you can't make a good program unless you have at least
some understanding of the basic technology/mathematics of the algorithm.
If you haven't the result will at best be as all these automaticly
translated texts that you can find...
/Nils-Arne