Most posts (including the most recent thread: "The Promise of Forth")
tend to try and focus on why Forth is/isn't just as good as <insert
competitive language here> and then proceed to spout statistics on
productivity, write-only code, difficulty of floating point
calculations, efficiency of the stack (good and bad), etc.
I'd like to discuss the (de?)merits of Forth from a different
perspective. With my current outlook on computing (which tends to
change every 5 years or so), the future is quite bright down the path
of vector-based, multi-core, parallel computing. [Note: obviously
there will always be a need for very small device programming. When
that's the case, I would choose no other language than Forth].
The core concepts of Forth: dual stack, highly factored, simplicity,
etc, all lend themselves to being very applicable in any settings.
However, I have a very difficult time picturing the use of Forth on a
GPU, doing large FE analysis across 100s of machines, or for real-time
stock trading. That's not to say it couldn't be done, just that I
don't think it will be. And that saddens me.
I'm curious, have there been any efforts or attempts to massively
parallelize a Forth implementation and allow cross-process/thread
communication (ala Erlang) or perhaps to create a vectorized Forth for
large vector and matrix operations? If so, how did these
implementation work out, what was different about them from a
standard, ANS Forth implementation? Were there any inherent advantages
to using Forth once the project was done? Disadvantages?
I've used Forth quite successfully in the past for a few projects. But
I've always felt that [ANS] Forth was the wrong solution anytime I
needed to use floating point math, do large-scale mathematics, or
where job scheduling, multi-threading, and problem distributing across
machines were all critical to the success of the project. That's not
to say Forth can't do those things, just that I found myself far more
productive - quicker - doing those things in C (or another language at
times). And I'm very interesting in work others have done in Forth
where those were their goals.
Jeff M.
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