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

Joe Bowbeer wrote:
> 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.

That's not true for myself (although you wouldn't know it from anything
online), and it's definitely not true for the Factor contributors 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 :)

That's true if by "these ... impractical languages" you're not referring
to all concatenative languages, but rather only the experimental
languages we spend much of our time discussing here.

Hint: if you want to get practical, you'll also have to get specific.
Nobody's ever done anything practical in "a concatenative language";
rather, we work in "Forth", or "Factor", or even "Joy". If you want to
get practical, you have to do the same; and once you choose which one,
this newsgroup isn't the most focussed place to discuss anymore, so
you'll probably start posting to comp.lang.forth, or the colorforth
newsgroup, or the Factor discussion list, or wherever your language is
most topically discussed.

Don't get me wrong; we welcome all the concatenative languages here, but
there's tons of good reasons to carry on the real technical discussions
where they can be more focussed, and seen by people who are truly
experts, and NOT seen by people who aren't using that language at all.

I'm actually not criticising your post, by the way; I think it's not an
unreasonable characterization of the group, and I don't mind it. Perhaps
someday we'll be known for our legendary advances in integrating
technology and human factors; for now I guess we're just trying to
figure this whole new thing out.

> Joe

-Wm