Re: [stack] sweetening concatenative syntax

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "William Tanksley, Jr" <[email protected]>
To: <[email protected]>
Sent: Thursday, March 06, 2008 12:31 PM
Subject: Re: [stack] sweetening concatenative syntax


> Stevan Apter <[email protected]> wrote:
>> given the decision to code in a concatenative
>>  language, i want my concatenativity neat, straight no chaser.
> 
> Heh. I'm the same way -- of course. That's a little bit of the
> language researcher speaking rather than the true polyglot programmer,
> though. Like the chemist that I was trained as, I'm always wondering
> what would happen if I made a slightly purer extract. Well, I guess I
> skip the step of blowing the resulting extract up in my face -- that's
> the fun part of chemistry.
> 
>>  like about joy.  in contrast to dan, i think introducing variables in
>>  any form should be resisted (although i've implemented both in my toy
>>  languages, just for the heck of it.)
> 
> Yup.
> 
>> moreover, i agree with something dr. tanksley has often said:
> 
> Thank you, but I'm just Mr. Tanksley so far. I'm just starting on a
> Master's degree, so perhaps you'll be able to address me as "dread
> lord tanksley" in a while. (Is that the correct form of address?)

"your royal hic-haec-hoc-itude?"

> 
>> we don't yet know all the properties of
>>  these languages in their pure form, since no one (as far as i can tell
>>  from years on this list) has written any large-scale, multi-programmer,
>>  long-lived applications in any concatenative language.  many small
>>  examples, much tinkering under the hood, but nothing approaching the
>>  scale of, say, ebay.
> 
> I'm not so sure about that. Forth has been used in enormous
> applications; see http://www.forth.com/resources/appNotes/index.html
> (and that's just one Forth company). Postscript forms one of the
> largest systems ever built (just about every computer is able to hook
> up to just about every Postscript printer almost right out of the
> box); it's not an integrated or monolithic system like eBay, but it's
> phenomenally successful at what it's designed to do.

i'm not sure either.  i've often thought it would be useful to come
up with something like the complement of fred brook's no-silver-
bullet analysis:  a list of the properties which make an application
"hard" -- for a programming language, for programmers, for companies,
&c.  e.g. big data, need for speed, fault-tolerance, life-and-death
consequences of bugs, rapidly changing demands, need to be shrink-
wrapped for users (a.k.a. The Enemy), &c.  so an app can be hard
in some dimensions, easy in others, &c.  and out of that you get
consensus around a maxim i've always found somewhat depressing:  
use the right tool for the job.  

> 
> -Wm
>