[stack] Advantages of cat, joy ..?

Since I started reading this mail-list all I've got is:
'look ma I can wear my cap backwards;
and you can turn it inside out;
and if you turn it to the right and march north,
  it points in the direction, where the sun rises,
 which will tell you approximately where the sun sets'.
So what ?
What the point of it all ?!

What I've been hoping for is pointers to increased
productivety, based on:
* we naturally want to be more productive;
 i.e. acheive more output with less effort;
* computer programming is constrained by human
  attributes, eg.
A. the 7+-2 rule, and
B. 'recognition is easier than remembering';
* etc. - this is psychology, not compt-science.

Which leads to facilities which aid productivety eg.:
* any thing that helps reduced the mental clutter,
 by chunking several items together into a single
idea: subroutines, data structures ...OOP.
* since we've spent a life time reading, lets
  use this honed skill and have mnemonic IDs.
 Although java's verbosity can overwhelm.

The coming productivety increase I'd
hoped for is formal methods, whereby
an 'algebra' would allow sequences of
statements/expression to be reduced to
simpler [in size or understandability]
form.  Imagine what magic Pythagoras is
if you've got a W * H tunnel  and you need
to know if a L wide strip can pass through it.

To concretize my criticism with a real example,
I recently investigated gforth > OOF, and
reached the following 'feeling' [obviously it's
subjective and fuzzy]:-
* perhaps the mental clutter can be reduced
once a suitable class heirarchy is built ?
* the gap between forth's syntax and natural
  language [which we've been practicing all
 our lives] reduces productivety.
* the arbitrary syntax of especially the new
  constructs of OOF, could be profitably handled
  by templates, or even better a structured
  editor, instead of 'learning telephone numbers'.
* forth is good for bootstrapping a new make of
  CPU, but not much else - ito productivety.

IMO forth is cute and fascinating but not
productive.

AFAIK the 'joy web site', mentions the word
"algebra", but doesn't show any complete
solution of a problem, eg. "the following
form <X> can be transformed the <Y> which
is seen to prove P; which solves problem Q".

Top down design means define the problem
and show how it's solved.

Is there any useful contribution to increased
productivety yet,  in knowing that language
X can be viewed as a sequence of
tranformations of stacks ?

== Chris Glur.