John Doty wrote:
> But you are just trying to define the problem away: language, as
> understood by linguists, is what engages the human "language instinct",
> and that's a powerful mental "muscle". Weaker definitions only suit a
> weak language, one that cannot as effectively employ human mental power.
That's under the theory that the human mind thinks in terms of language
only. A rather stupid theory IMHO; if it would be true, 90% of our brain
would have been wasted (maybe it *is* wasted with most of the
population). "A picture says more than 1000 words" already tells you that
people have severe difficulties to map graphical thoughts into language.
They have the same problems with other thoughts, that's why mathematics
invent their own way of communication instead of using normal language.
Your critic that Forth forces the user to think like a computer IMHO is
the
strength of Forth. In order to program a computer, I have to think like a
computer, I can't use the imprecise, inaccurate thinking I do when talking
to other people (often the main message is between the lines, e.g. when
joking). The computer needs to be told exactly what it must do and in
which
order.
Forth allows me to do that easily, because it is rather unambiguous about
how the computer understands it (unlike e.g. C, where different
implementations can even have different precedence rules for some
operators, or at least had in the transition between K&R and ANSI - today,
I only use GCC, and won't see the problem anymore). I view my brain as a
flexible entity, and I can wrap it around the problem, not the other way
round. That's why the language that fits me allows me to wrap the language
around the problem, too.
Even if Larry Wall is right, and the majority of the population likes a
computer language that allows them to talk to the computer like they talk
to humans (imprecise ;-), I hate his language. Perl IMHO is gibberish (it
resembles a cat walking over a keyboard much more than any natural
language), and the semantics is so imprecise that most Perl programs I had
to maintain (typical write-once-run-a-few-times programs) were a bag of
bugs, which were better replaced completely (in my case by Forth
programs).
If Larry Wall's language design is a consequence of the psychology of most
programmers, I don't want to know what madness lies behind that ;-). Maybe
there's no accident that Larry won the obfuscated C contest twice.
--
Bernd Paysan
"If you want it done right, you have to do it yourself"
http://www.jwdt.com/~paysan/
|
