wmb@MITCH.ENG.SUN.COM (Mitch Bradley) (08/29/90)
> I know it's a trite joke, but it [FORTH] IS rather write-only and that's the > principle inhibition to both learning the language and to code sharing and > reading that are inherent to large projects these days. Forth is not write-only at all. It is true that relatively few programmers know how to read it, but that is an entirely different thing. Any language is unreadable if you don't know the vocabulary. For millions of Americans, Chinese is totally unreadable, but that doesn't stop billions of Chinese from reading it. The problem with Forth is that the vocabulary is rather extensive, and completely new for most programmers. I routinely read other people's Forth code, with no problems, and other people read my code. In a large project, it is important to enforce coding style standards so that visual clues help rather than hinder. It is also important to use lots of stack comments. Finally, software engineering tools like those present in Unix help a lot. Given a disciplined team of Forth programmers, Forth can be successfully used for large projects. We have 7 programmers working on the Sun firmware, which consists of about 300 files. So far, it is working out quite well. Mitch