On Aug 21, 10:57 pm, Steven D'Aprano <st...@remove-this-
cybersource.com.au> wrote:
> Anyway, I'm looking forward to hear why overuse of the return stack is a
> big reason why people use GCC rather than Forth. (Why GCC? What about
> other C compilers?) Me, in my ignorance, I thought it was because C was
> invented and popularised by the same universities which went on to teach
> it to millions of programmers, and is firmly in the poplar and familiar
> Algol family of languages, while Forth barely made any impression on
> those universities, and looks like line-noise and reads like Yoda. (And
> I'm saying that as somebody who *likes* Forth and wishes he had more use
> for it.) In my experience, the average C programmer wouldn't recognise a
> return stack if it poked him in the eye.
"The Empire Strikes Back" was a popular movie. I read an article ("The
puppet like, I do not") criticizing the movie though. At one point,
Luke asked why something was true that Yoda had told him, and Yoda
replied: "There is no why!" The general idea is that the sudent (Luke)
was supposed to blindly accept what the professor (Yoda) tells him. If
he asks "why?," he gets yelled at.
This is also the attitude that I find among college graduates. They
just believe what their professors told them in college, and there is
no why. This is essentially the argument being made above --- that C
is taught in college and Forth is not, therefore C is good and Forth
is bad --- THERE IS NO WHY!
People who promote "idiomatic" programming are essentially trying to
be Yoda. They want to criticize people even when those people's
programs work. They are just faking up their own expertise --- many of
them have never actually written a program that works themselves.
The reason why I like programming is because there is an inherent anti-
bullshit mechanism in programming. Your program either works or it
doesn't. If your program doesn't work, then it doesn't matter if it is
idiomatic, if you have a college degree, etc., etc.. That is the way I
see it, anyway. This perspective doesn't hold for much on
comp.lang.forth where we have people endlessly spouting blather
*about* programming, without actually doing any programming
themselves. This is why I don't take c.l.f. very seriously; people
attack me all of the time and I don't really care --- I know that my
programs work, which is what matters in the real world.
(Pardon my use of the word "bullshit" above; there is no better term
available.)
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