Re: a few thoughts on the future

On Fri, May 1, 2009 at 10:02 PM,  <[email protected]> wrote:
>
> I cannot help but wonder if the future of colorForth has been hindered
> by an absence of applications.

If by applications you mean a functional TCP/IP stack and drivers for
some popular network cards, I'd say yes.  If you mean  applications by
microcontroller projects developed with it, because the current code
is Intel only and highly non-trivial to port, then also yes.  If you
mean applications as in word processing, photo manipulation, and AV
centers then not so much.

> But am I wrong in thinking if we could connected to the internet and have a web browser, people would look up and take notice?

Well we already have several colorforths connected to the internet and
"no one" has really noticed, but popularity has never been a good
indication of quality either (cough Walmart cough cough).  There was a
webbrowser develop for some of the forth chips an few years back
according to Jeff Fox's site, but even if I'm successful in writing my
own webbrowser I expect the total market share it will get is those
people who are using the browser to edit NewScript.

Personally, what I think would get people to take notice is if we
developed educational material, that allowed young kids to learn to
program, and solve problems using computers.  Supposedly, forth can be
taught to a novice programmer in a matter of hours to a degree that
will allow them to do some useful programming.  Now that we have
several colorforth  inspired environments that are available to anyone
with web browser, that would probably go a lot further to promote
thoughtful programming.

Most people in the world don't know Java, Lisp, or C.  But we could
probably teach them colorforth :)