Re: part 21 asserts forth best for small memory systems, would lisp

Duke Normandin wrote:
> On Tue, 11 Mar 2008, Jonah Thomas wrote:
> 
>>
>> Duke Normandin <dukeofperl@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
>>> Jonah Thomas wrote:
>>>> It's a big deal that most of the applications
>>>> you're used to won't be on a Forth OS until somebody writes them in
>>>> Forth or assembler or a combination. And if you write them in Forth
>>>> or assembler or a combination for one ForthOS they won't run on any
>>>> other ForthOS without a lot of modification.
>>> Yep! That sucks! Would be hard to make a living writing office
>>> productivity software for the Forth community unless you knew every
>>> bloody Forth dialect that exists. Maybe folks clued in to that 20-25
>>> years ago, and said adios - I'm off to see the wizard, the wonderful
>>> wizard of ???
>> If you want your computer to run just one application, it isn't such a
>> big deal. A webserver or other. You write your one application in
Forth,
>> the ForthOS supplies whatever low-level things you don't want to bother
>> doing yourself, and it has to be a giant commercial success before
>> anybody makes the effort to hack into it.
> 
> Again, we're back to one box, one Forth, and apps for that bundle. In
the
> desktop market a proprietary OS for a given set of hardware has not been
> as successful as the MSDOS/Windows Linux/BSD approach. Apple has finally
> realized that - to some extent - as well. Now if ForthOS was the only
> Forth around, or at least the only one worth bothering with for use with
a
> one-task box or a general-purpose workstation, _then_ we'd have
something
> to build a future on, IMHO. Or is there no future in the desktop market?

Like it or not, Forth is a niche language.  It was designed specifically 
for "one box, one Forth, and apps for that bundle".  Implementations 
under host OSs have broadened that reach considerably, and there are 
some significant Windows-based apps out there.  There's no reason you 
couldn't write cool desktop apps in it if you want to, and they will 
sell based on their own merits (independent of the language they were 
written in).  But a ForthOS taking over the desktop market simply isn't 
gonna happen.  Not enough benefits to counter the big negative of being 
too much of a niche item.

Cheers,
Elizabeth

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