On Sat, 8 Mar 2008, Mark W. Humphries wrote:
>
>
> On Mar 9, 11:51 am, John Doty <j...@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
> [snip]
> > > In any event, what has the source language got to do with it?
> >
> > That's my question. It has been asserted by a number of people here
that
> > Forth code is rarely published because most is proprietary. But why
> > should that be language dependent? There's plenty of published code in
> > other languages, why not Forth?
>
> The traditional Forth approach is to solve specific problems by
> extending a Forth into a custom proprietary interpreter targeted at
> that specific problem. The Forth approach is not about producing
> generic solutions for generic problems. Why would it be surprising
> that most Forth code is proprietary?
But does it have to stay that way? It seems to me that back when FIG was
active with a large member****p, they were well on their way to creating a
large body of published PD code - whatever category.
It seems to me that it was in the best interest of the commercial Forths
to
keep code bottled up in order to preserve a competitive edge. So really
we
had a class struggle between the Berkeley-style geeks of FIG and the
commercial suits. The suits won out, the Forth hackers of FIG bailed, and
here we are - barely no code in the PD, but a lot of claims of this and
that.
Look, there has been plenty of proprietary code written in C. That did not
stop Rasmus Lerdorf from writing PHP and offering it to the world. Same
goes for Apache. Go look at Perl's CPAN. Again I'm sure that there exists
proprietary Perl code.
No! The Forth suits wanted no competition from a world full of hackers.
They
wanted to maintain and control the Forth mystique. They got it!
Now, how do we turn that around. Gforth is a damn good start IMHO!
[snip]
--
Duke Normandin
dukeofperl@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Because it messes up the order in which people normally read text.
Q: Why is top-posting such a bad thing?
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