Re: Adventures with Building Applications

[email protected] wrote:
> Thank you for the thoughtful and detailed post. 
>   
You're welcome.
>  I'm also grateful
> you shared your experience on this list; our numbers here are small so
> anytime someone shares some of their experience I find it very
> interesting.
I am hoping that by implementing a version of CF in javascript as well, 
I can help pull in some converts by making the language more 
accessible.  I just whipped up a simple colored editor this morning, and 
am now converting it to use the canvas widget so that it has bitmapped 
graphics support just like the native one.  Forth faces many of the same 
acceptance problems as Smalltalk.  Both are older languages, with a rich 
history of successes and failures, and buck the mainstream when it comes 
to development style.  Smalltalk on the other hand is having a 
resurgence due to projects like Squeak, Seaside, and gaining some 
visibility due to projects like Sun's Lively Kernel:

http://research.sun.com/projects/lively/

And if you look at things like VPRI's research, and goal to develop a 
full software stack in 20k lines of code,

http://vpri.org/

You have a bunch of very smart people who are trying to basically 
reinvent what Forth has long done, only coming at it from the world of 
late bound languages with extensible grammars.  Most of their time is 
spent trying to come up with new ways to out clever the problem, by late 
binding everything, effectively pushing edit and compile time into 
runtime.  A smart aleck  would simply hand them one of Chuck's forths on 
Chuck's hardware and say "Here you're done".  But that would just ruin 
their fun :)

Dave

-- 

David J. Goehrig


Email: [email protected]