Re: A Brief Look at History

m-coughlin <m-coughlin@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:

>    I noticed where there was some programming in Forth being
> done at the Harvard Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory, down
> the street from where I lived, across town from where John Doty
> worked. When I learned enough about Forth to maybe get a job at
> the Astrophysical Observatory, I discovered they had fired the
> Forth programmers, trashed their code, and were writing
> astronomical imaging programs in some other language instead. I
> investigated further and was told the programmers could not read
> their own code and this was only because they were using Forth.
> I knew that this is not true and it was because of poor
> commenting style and poor management. I convinced no one. I have
> not been able to convince any Forth programmer that Forth's
> commenting style needs to be improved either. 

I have heard this same exact story with the same wording from a large
handful of different places, usually from the late 1980's but sometimes
the early 1990's. An NRAO shop in suburban Maryland. A privately-owned
cor****ation in Boston. A privately-owned company in Oregon. A large
publicly-owned cor****ation again in Boston. "We fired the Forth
programmers and quit using Forth because they couldn't read their own
code."

I don't know now whether there was some problem with Forth commenting or
whether it was just the custom -- what managers told each other to say
when they fired the Forth programmers. How did the managers test whether
the Forth programmers could read their own code? Do they use the same
tests to decide whether individual C++ programmers can read their own
code?

I did a google search on  can't|couldn't read his|their own code.

C/C++
http://forums.civfanatics.com/archive/index.php/t-166431.html

Java IDEs
http://forum.java.sun.com/thread.jspa?threadID=158369&messageID=467108

various, from comp.lang.misc
http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.misc/browse_thread/thread/984759db724234d1/4007325902c53b0e%234007325902c53b0e
----
>>                        Scheme seems to share much of its syntax with
>>Lisp, which tends to be a "write only" language.
>Hardly true of Scheme/Lisp.  The only language that might be truly
>said to possess this characteristic is APL, and only because of its
>infernal character set.  (Because of this, APL is the one language
>I've encountered in my life that I've never _wanted_ to master.)
>Substituting each APL operator with a descriptive name would certainly
>go a long way towards making it less of a "write-only" language.

Actually, FORTH is also an extremely write-only language.  I also find
that Lisp is somewhat write-only when complex programs are programmed
in a funcational style.

I suspect that languages are write-only more because they lack names for
local variables or intermediate results that because they have unusual
characters representing functions.  I mean, who would want to write
out "iota" or "rho" every time you wanted an array? :-) :-) 
----

HTML editors
http://groups.google.com/group/alt.html/browse_thread/thread/61a02bf5fad8d936/8b109a801e7aece3%238b109a801e7aece3

Perl
http://reddit.com/r/programming/info/65ez2/comments/c02w5go

Sydney Linux User's Group about somebody named Raster
http://lists.slug.org.au/archives/slug-chat/2001/04/index.html#00214

An individual style of apache tomcat
http://markmail.org/message/ql2ivx5tgn4a526f#query:%22can%27t%20read%20his%20own%20code%22+page:1+mid:ql2ivx5tgn4a526f+state:results

An old comp.lang.forth topic where you said roughly the same things
you're saying now and I responded pretty much the same. ho hum. Here's
Bernd's response to you, which I thought was excellent:
http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.forth/msg/aa20040e2d763089

The sample isn't large enough but it shows the trend. 7 references
outside clf. One of them mentions Forth in passing and uses Forth as the
obvious example of a write-only language. Somebody else disagrees and
also disagrees for Scheme and basicly every other unusual language
except APL. That responder spends some time explaining why it turned out
that APL is unreadable but shouldn't be. 

I'll bet if you find a hundred people who've never used Forth but who've
heard of it, 98 of them will have heard it's unreadable. Probably 5 or
10 of them will have heard the story about the Forth programmers who
couldn't read their own code. This says nothing about how hard it is to
read Forth code, what commenting styles would help, or how many Forth
programmers have trouble reading their own code.

> I have
> not been able to convince any Forth programmer that Forth's
> commenting style needs to be improved either. 

Many Forth programmers have experimented with new commenting styles.
Where are you continuing to see Forth code that's badly commented? How
many lines of poorly-commented Forth code have you seen that were
written since you failed to convince us to comment better?