Re: The Promise of Forth

Having read this thread from its beginning, it sweep over this newbie that
the current Forth community - such as it is - is _not_ a co-operative
society, but rather a chronically argumentative one. It is truely sick!
I've read a lot of editions of the Forth Dimension, and I honestly did not
ever once get the sense that the Forth community - in its FIG incarnation
- was falling apart at the seams, like the current community appears to
be. I get the feeling now that the Forth community efforts have regressed
to that of a multi-national pissing contest.

If I'm correct, this to me is truely sad! I know that I am _never_ going
to be in the same league as any one of you "forthers". This community is
made up of some extremely bright folks - but you guys can't get your shit
in one bag!! I cannot imagine anything that you guys could not accomplish
if you did get it together! It's depressing to listen to the lot of you
pop off! -- and in public where the whole world can witness the last
members of a community argue themselves into extinction / oblivion.

I agree with John Doty in that I sense that Forth has the makings of
becoming great in some form. I have no clue what needs to change with
Forth. All I know is that I taught myself Perl, PHP, TCL/Tk and now
newLisp with very little effort. But for some reason, I'm struggling with
Forth. It feels like a hodge-podge of kludges to me. Perl is like that too
in some ways, IMO.

So what'll it be? Are you guys going to continue along the sophist path to
extinction if not utter irrelevance, or are you willing to at least _try_
to get your shit together? If you can't do for yourselves, could you do
for the self-esteem of Forth in general? Or have you all degenerated to
being more Fart(h)ers than Forthers? Please give this newbie some hope for
Forth! Let's resurrect FIG!! Can we do that together? Can we crank out a
"generic Forth" that we can all live with to be the new FIG flagship?
Maybe the new "generic Forth" can include something from each of the
current Forth hackers' Forth ;) You guys set up a core team and designate
who can commit code to the project, a la the FreeBSD project. What do you
say? You guys have the brain-power to do it -- and you need now is the
WILL!

Ok -- I'm done! BTW, none of the above was written with _any_ malice!
-- 
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?