On Mar 8, 4:18 am, John Doty <j...@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
> Mark W. Humphries wrote:
> > On Mar 8, 3:16 am, John Doty <j...@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
> >> Mark W. Humphries wrote:
> >>> On Mar 8, 2:50 am, Richard Owlett <rowl...@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
> >>> [snip]
> >>>> Seems Forth gets used where goal is COMPETITIVE COMMERCIAL
advantage.
> >>> Exactly, for a business whether or not to share code is a commercial
> >>> decision not to be taken lightly.
> >>> I currently see no commercial advantage to sharing the code that
most
> >>> differentiates our products from those of our competition. If on the
> >>> other hand we one day write a new device driver, or a some generic
> >>> utility for FreeBSD, for example, than I would have no problem
> >>> contributing this code to the open source community. But sharing the
> >>> code at the heart of our competitive advantage would be commiting
> >>> commercial hara-kiri.
> >> What does this have to do with Forth?
>
> > Everything.
>
> Oh yes? What about all of the proprietary software in other languages?
> You personally choose Forth. Apparently most who write such software
don't.
Why would I care? I'm not in the language marketing business.
> > We use Forth for those areas which differentiate our
> > products, the mass appeal of the language isn't in any way a
> > consideration, neither is reusing other's code. It's only for those
> > aspects that are non-differentiating (and therefore generic) that
> > popularity comes into play and we go with the flow of the m*****.
>
> What weakness in Forth restricts it to these situations?
Mass appeal is fickle and always in flux, nothing stays in fa****on
forever. What weakness prevents chartreuse from being in fa****on
this year?
I don't really care if there are hordes of trendy programmers using
Forth or not, since popularity only only affects what language and
tools we adopt for those aspects of our products that have no
intrinsic differentiating value to us.
Cheers
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