Aleksej Saushev wrote:
....
> I think, the the whole Forth community would benefit much from
> simple project: overview of that famous Taygeta archive.
> It will cut Forth proponents down to size, and probably force
> them to think about the high quality of software, they're so
> much proud of.
The Taygeta archive is mostly a relic of the hobbyist era of Forth (the
80's). AFAIK, in 35 years of successful Forth programming, no one at
FORTH, Inc. has used it. So, I'm not sure what your point is.
....
>
> The rapid development is another frequent point of Forth proponents,
> let's see: string processing, list processing (if you sacrifice
> performance to speed of development, if not, add balanced trees
> and/or other more complex structures), networking, database
> connection (even simple one, Berkeley-style). Pretty many of
> usual things, you have to deal with _from_scratch_. And this is
> all basic stuff, you don't need to take care of, if you have
> ready libraries. In Forth communities I've seen only one way
> to close the gap: through FFI to C-written libraries.
Well, that's a very specific list of desiderata, obviously for a
particular class of applications. It is appropriate, as John Passiniti
frequently observes, to chose a language that's a good match for your
application domain. Forth might or might not be it; that's no fault of
Forth, no one language is ideal for all application domains.
In the world I work in, embedded systems, we need none of the features
on your list. In the past, you've deprecated embedded systems
programming, but the fact is there are far, far more microcontrollers in
use in embedded systems than all the PCs and mainframes in the world (a
typical new car has over 100, for example). In embedded systems, you
need easy and intimate access to hardware features and I/O under
development, extremely low overhead I/O and interrupt handling, and (in
most cases) low memory requirements. Forth excels at all this.
And all the Forths adapted for Windows and *nix hosted platforms do
feature easy mechanisms for calling C or other subroutines, so their
users have the same access to libraries as anyone else.
Cheers,
Elizabeth
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