Re: [stack] Advantages of cat, joy ..?

Chris,

While I think the overwhelming majority on this list are more open to
self-examination and criticism than "sod off and leave us alone" (only
slightly paraphrased), I've also come to the conclusion that the
productivity and effectiveness of concatenative languages in the everyday
world of programming -- as we programmers experience programming in our
everyday lives -- is not a genuine driving interest of those on this list.

What drives discussion on this list is a shared affection for these simple,
puzzling, terse, powerful, (and so on...), and almost completely impractical
languages :)

Joe

On Mon, Feb 16, 2009 at 5:17 AM, chris glur wrote:

> 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.
>


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