RAYBRO%UTRC@UTRCGW.UTC.COM ("William R Brohinsky", ay) (06/02/90)
In the current war-of-the-ansi-roses, Mitch Bradley and John Wavrik have exchanged words over minimalism and `kitchen-sink'ism. Being, by turns one of each (or maybe only half of each), I would like to throw in my 20 mills: I am a minimalist when I want to play with things in real time. I am a kitchen-sinkist when I MUST (not just when I feel like it!) produce a gigantic application, when I MUST share the work, or when I MUST make a program damn fool proof (and there are a lot of them in my customer base...). I cannot see the point in making FORTH so much like C that you have to know C to use FORTH; no one will do it. I also can't see the need to make FORTH go away in the face of C. I have just recently learned C. To do it, I had to go to a 1 week course (put on by Microsoft). In this course, I mostly learned the dialect of the computer scientists who talk about C. I did not learn about anything along the way of how to program, nor how to structure (either my programs or my data) which I hadn't used with FORTH, but hadn't called by their `proper names' before. I mostly learned the proper names. As an aside: If I go to another country, I try to learn enough of the local language to be able to read headlines and street signs. Because I learned latin in high school, I could deal with many European country's languages. Even Jugoslavia was not that hard to cope with! If I went to Japan, I could well be lost. This is the kind of problem that I had with C, coming from a BASIC background. My forth background was like an `orthogonal experience'. This is, IMHO, a Good Thing. Now, to get back to the point, I program in FORTH when I twiddle bits, and I program in C when I do simulations and process data. If I have to process text, I use whatever's handy, usually interchangeably. If I were limited to knowing only one language, it would probably be C, but there is no one in this country who'll limit me that way but me! So is this whole battle really about `is C or FORTH better for X' or is it about `I don't want to be bothered/feel the need/need to be burdened with/to learning/learn two languages'? For me, FORTH was infinitely easier to learn than C. C is easier to use IN SOME CASES, and FORTH is easier to use IN OTHERS. I don't want them to become identical, because I like the differences. So much for my input-my two cents just ran out. raybro