At 04:19 PM 4/26/2001 -0700, Larry Wall wrote:
>Dan Sugalski writes:
>: And on the other hand you have things like Forth where every program
>: essentially defines its own variant of the language, and that works out
>: reasonably well. (Granted it's more of a niche language, especially today,
>: but that's probably more due to its RPN syntax)
>
>Perhaps. I would also attribute Forth's lack of success in part to its
>lack of standardization, but only in conjunction with its lack of
>standardization, if you take my meaning. The core distribution was
>too small to establish a common culture.
It was also the age it was developed in, and the area it came from. It
never really hit critical mass, as much because critical mass was really
hard to hit at the time as anything else. That seems like a strange thing
to say, given how many versions were all over the place, not to mention the
forth chips that were designed, but it was really true. There were small
clumps of forth folks, but not in places where it ultimately mattered to
make the language widespread.
Still, I'd guess that the RPNishess was the big reason. It really hurt to
get into Forth mode at times since you had to think so differently.
>I would also argue that Forth's diversity was driven in part by its
>lack of support for other programming paradigms. I don't see Perl
>falling into that trap any time soon either...
Well, it was the Second Age of computing, and that age has passed. There's
also limit to what you can do with 32K of RAM handy. (if you were lucky)
Dan
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Dan Sugalski even samurai
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