John you nailed it. I was a big forth fan in the mid-80s but it was very clear that you either had to spend a lot of money on proprietary systems or do it ALL yourself. Not having any money I was pleased to be able to do it all but today, in the age of instant communication and collaboration, its not a competitive option in any language. Had forth kicked off the open source community about a decade earlier than the UNIX folk (in useful terms) I think we'd be living in a much different world from a computing perspective. Forth is still cool - but only when its for something I wanna do all by myself... :)
-- Ben John Doty wrote: > I realized that I have a little job on the table that is a fine test of > the Python versus Standard Forth code availability and reusability issue. > > Note that I have little experience with either Python or Standard Forth > (but I have much experience with a very nonstandard Forth). I've noodled > around a bit with both gforth and Python, but I've never done a serious > application in either. In my heart, I'm more of a Forth fan: Python is a > bit too much of a black box for my taste. But in the end, I have work to > get done. > > The problem: > > I have a bunch of image files in FITS format. For each raster row in > each file, I need to determine the median pixel value and subtract it > from all of the pixels in that row, and then write out the results as > new FITS files. > > This is a real problem I need to solve, not a made-up toy problem. I was > originally thinking of solving it in C (I know where to get the pieces > in that language), but it seemed like a good test problem for the Python > versus Forth issue. > > I looked to import FITS reading/writing, array manipulation, and median > determination. From there, the solution should be pretty easy. > > So, first look for a median function in Python. A little googling finds: > > http://www.astro.cornell.edu/staff/loredo/statpy/ > > Wow! This is good stuff! An embarrassment of riches here! There are even > several FITS modules, and I wasn't even looking for those yet. And just > for further gratification, the page's author is an old student of mine > (but I'll try not to let this influence my attitude). So, I followed the > link to: > > http://www.nmr.mgh.harvard.edu/Neural_Systems_Group/gary/python.html > > From there, I downloaded stats.py, and the two other modules the page > says it requires, and installed them in my site-packages directory. Then > "from stats import median" got me a function to approximately determine > the median of a list. It just worked. The approximation is good enough > for my purposes here. > > Pyfits required a little more resourcefulness, in part because STSCI's > ftp server was down yesterday, but I got it installed too. It helps that > when something is missing, the error message gives you a module name. It > needs the numarray module, so I got array manipulation as a side effect. > > I haven't finished the program, but I've tried out the pieces and all > looks well here. > > OK, now for Forth. Googling for "forth dup swap median" easily found: > > http://www.taygeta.com/fsl/library/find.seq > > At first blush, this looked really good for Forth. The search zeroed in > on just what I wanted, no extras. The algorithm is better than the one > in the Python stats module: it gives exact results, so there's no need > to check that an approximation is good enough. But then, the > disappointment came. > > What do you do with this file? It documents the words it depends on, but > not where to get them. I'm looking at a significant effort to assemble > the pieces here, an effort I didn't suffer through with Python. So, my > first question was: "Is it worth it?". > > The answer came from searching for FITS support in Forth. If it exists > in public, it must be really well hidden. That's a "show stopper", so > there was no point in pursuing the Forth approach further. > > In the end, it was like comparing a muzzle-loading sharpshooter's rifle > with a machine gun: Forth got off one really good shot, but Python just > mowed the problems down. > > The advocates of the idea that Standard Forth has been a boon to code > reusability seem mostly to be people with large private libraries of > Forth legacy code. No doubt to them it really has been a boon. But I > think this little experiment shows that for the rest of us, Python has a > published base of reusable code that puts Forth to shame. > > -- > John Doty, Noqsi Aerospace, Ltd. > -- > Specialization is for robots. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
