Ron AARON <clf@8th-dev.com> writes:
> Heh. Yeah, acquiring Israeli citizenship gets you drafted here, as
> well. I expect most people do know that, though; it's not a secret...

There is a pretty funny book about this, "The 188th Crybaby Brigade":

https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/-/-/9781416549321

Hugh, I wasn't referring to you particular, but the continual state of division in the forth community and good leadership to over come it.

The whole thing about Borland's, is it would have attached a lot of new people, rather than decline, and lead to improvements. Successful mass commercial enterprise and leadership in producing a good common product, leads to some successful structure. Other people ignore, the example of the 1 billion dollars IBM put into Linux development to pay for pro development, decades back, equivalent to many billion today, which set Linux up for a lot of success. The right commercial development of a product and market raises the bar. But, what we have here, is very small firms, of which MPE might be an example of having the greatest traction. I'm not intending to get involved in the side discussion here on your past experiences, and your present argument, except I see your point of view about various things.

On Friday, October 15, 2021 at 3:08:18 PM UTC+10, Hugh Aguilar wrote:
> On Thursday, October 14, 2021 at 12:31:39 AM UTC-7, Wayne morellini wrote:
> > There is a lack of strong leadership in forth. Maybe Borland's interest in forth was as close as it got.
> Why would sucking Philippe Kahn's hairy ass be better than sucking Elizabeth Rather's fat ass?

On 16/10/2021 23:08, Paul Rubin wrote:
> Ron AARON <clf@8th-dev.com> writes:
>> Heh. Yeah, acquiring Israeli citizenship gets you drafted here, as
>> well. I expect most people do know that, though; it's not a secret...
>
> There is a pretty funny book about this, "The 188th Crybaby Brigade":
>
> https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/-/-/9781416549321
>

Heh. I'll have to check it out (though I'm sure I could have written the
book...)

On Saturday, October 16, 2021 at 7:28:58 PM UTC-7, Wayne morellini wrote:
> The whole thing about Borland's, is it would have attached a lot of new people,
> rather than decline, and lead to improvements.

Corporations don't lead to improvements, they lead to stagnation.
I bench-marked 16-bit LMI UR/Forth against Borland Turbo C (Small memory model)
using one of my recursive-descent probability calculation programs that took hours,
and I found that UR/Forth was almost exactly the same speed as Turbo C.
Borland was not that great for performance, and they weren't into improvement.
Borland was into selling a stable product, which means stagnation.

I doubt that a Borland Forth would have been very good. Philippe Kahn didn't have
a background in Forth programming --- he would have just made a Forth system
that looked like Turbo C or Turbo Pascal --- it would have likely used Turbo Debugger.
Forth Inc.'s PolyForth wasn't very good either, because Elizabeth Rather didn't have
a background in Forth programming (her background was in COBOL programming).

Corporations are your enemy --- they are not your friend --- they consider people
to be either customers or competitor, but not peers, and they don't want your input.

Borland customers would have likely stuck with Turbo C or Turbo Pascal and so
Turbo Forth would have been a quirky sideline that didn't get used very much
(that was what Turbo Prolog was) --- this is the path to failure, as bad as ANS-Forth.

LMI had cross-compilers for various micro-processors.
Testra did not hire LMI to write the cross-compiler for the MiniForth processor.
That would have cost a lot of money. Also, there is no guarantee that Ray Duncan
or anybody else at LMI would have been able to write the assembler --- the assembler
was significantly more difficult that the Forth cross-compiler.
I figured it out. I really doubt that a corporate drone would have figured it out.
I wrote MFX in UR/Forth because UR/Forth was the best Forth of that era, and because
Testra used UR/Forth exclusively, but I could have used one of the shareware Forth
systems instead and likely succeeded --- I don't need a big corporation behind me.

On 17/10/2021 13:28, Wayne morellini wrote:
> Hugh, I wasn't referring to you particular, but the continual state of division in the forth community and good leadership to over come it.
>
> The whole thing about Borland's, is it would have attached a lot of new people, rather than decline, and lead to improvements. Successful mass commercial enterprise and leadership in producing a good common product, leads to some successful structure. Other people ignore, the example of the 1 billion dollars IBM put into Linux development to pay for pro development, decades back, equivalent to many billion today, which set Linux up for a lot of success. The right commercial development of a product and market raises the bar. But, what we have here, is very small firms, of which MPE might be an example of having the greatest traction.

Let's take MPE. It has an exceptional product in the form of VFX that's even
free for non-commercial use. Yet forthers continue to create their own compilers.
That tells me Forth isn't a product that can be marketed and whose audience may
be easily cultivated - but an idea that's intangible and different as one user to
the next. How many languages exist in which one can honestly say one has made it
one's own - that's not the product of someone else's mind?

Hugh. You remind me a bit of an ex-friend of mine, who is top in his field.. I don't have time to keep going down this direction, I have had some physical damage. But to answer you. This is the problem of open source free software industry fillers not willing to admit the product and market stability bright in by big corporations a.d donors. My predictions many decades ago, was desktop Linux was not going to overtake windows soon, that it would take a long time, precisely for the reasons I've stated. That is the way it worked out. The right person with a billion dollar budget, could mainstream Linux within years. But, 100 million and ubuntu, did not offer sifficent growth. It is financing it all, which is where commercial companies can greatly promote a product (the 1 Billion is just to seed the penetration).

Now, the thing better corporations in technology do, is seed investment into new technology and startups. They also buy start ups and competitors to bring the technology in and spread it. Others compete against these things, developing their own technologies. View it as they supply administration and marketing, and others supply the technology.

The issue is Borland, would have cracked forth interest into the mass market, most likely of which were not going be hobbyists creating their own forth. This could attract others to join. The cycle of expansion and innovation investment could continued.

I didn't indicate how good Borland was. I simply said that was as close as we potentially got to the mass market.

I'm going make some observations based on what I said:

One. You seem to have ability such that your former employer could have made a lot more money holding onto you.

It is easy to say in hind sight. But if they had developed forth with better editor/project handler, redesigned the language to have an easier form of the language (along side the deep form) and allow the entry and interpretation of normal mathematical expressions. Included a easy tutorial program, and a start stop video tape tutorial, and advertised it in Byte magazine. They could have got a lot of market penetration, like Boland. But, that is how people who make big corporations think. We didn't really have those people.

We now have a lot of isolated people throwing comments at each other. Somebody previously commented against the idealism of working together for the common good. Yet, that produces more and better outcomes, improve society.

On 17/10/2021 21:08, Wayne morellini wrote:
>
> I didn't indicate how good Borland was. I simply said that was as close as we potentially got to the mass market.
>

"was" being the operative word. Borland's early fans have dispersed as
surely as Forth's did.

Forth's "Borland" was LMI. Duncan took the Fig-Forth listing, massaged
it work with the popular DOS' of the day, and sold it as a proprietary
closed-source product for $50.

dxforth <dxforth@gmail.com> writes:
[reformatted for conventional line length]
>Let's take MPE. It has an exceptional product in the form of VFX
>that's even free for non-commercial use. Yet forthers continue to
>create their own compilers. That tells me Forth isn't a product that
>can be marketed and whose audience may be easily cultivated - but an
>idea that's intangible and different as one user to the next.

There is no exclusivity between products and DIY. Forth systems
designed for use by others ("mere users") like VFX have existed for
more than 4 decades just as DIY Forths have been built and continue to
be built.

The same is true in other areas; e.g., cars have been commodity
products for the masses as well as objects for DIY projects. There
are also in-between cases, like kit cars, kit computers or IKEA
furniture.

- anton
--
M. Anton Ertl http://www.complang.tuwien.ac.at/anton/home.html
comp.lang.forth FAQs: http://www.complang.tuwien.ac.at/forth/faq/toc.html
New standard: http://www.forth200x.org/forth200x.html
EuroForth 2021: https://euro.theforth.net/2021

On Monday, 18 October 2021 at 09:20:35 UTC+1, Anton Ertl wrote:
> dxforth <dxf...@gmail.com> writes:
> [reformatted for conventional line length]
> >Let's take MPE. It has an exceptional product in the form of VFX
> >that's even free for non-commercial use. Yet forthers continue to
> >create their own compilers. That tells me Forth isn't a product that
> >can be marketed and whose audience may be easily cultivated - but an
> >idea that's intangible and different as one user to the next.

> There is no exclusivity between products and DIY. Forth systems
> designed for use by others ("mere users") like VFX have existed for
> more than 4 decades just as DIY Forths have been built and continue to
> be built.
>
> The same is true in other areas; e.g., cars have been commodity
> products for the masses as well as objects for DIY projects. There
> are also in-between cases, like kit cars, kit computers or IKEA
> furniture.
>
> - anton

I do kindly disagree with your definitions though.
In one way you might be right
as it is instructions in a sequence that do (hopefully) what is intended.

Anybody who is good enough in software can write a Forth - fine, often said here
How many are there?
How are they supported?
How successful are they in the market?
What are the pros and cons so people can decide?
What level of quality this then is, is as well another matter.
And if it was just an excercise, or, this Forth n+1 is there, but how is it supported?
What if others use it and it does not work as it should?

There is a "slight" difference if you sell a software product like VFX or any other commercial product.
Then customers will go after you for suport, modifications and so on.
If it was your hobby project - you can just say NO and walk away.
And I wonder how often this has happened and customers had to find another solution.

I do like your example of the DIY car.
To put it on the road, you have to have it checked / MOTed. Otherwise it sits in your garage as a nice toy.
Nothing like this exists for Forth Compilers to my knowledge.
Commercial Forths have the customer base as a test ground driving the product forward.

So, please make a distinction between commercial world and DIY stuff
- no matter how good they are.

And to try to put it into perspective:
Which commercial projects have these non-commercial Forths be used in that the community knows about?
If they are the same as commercial productsas you state,
the number of applications should be comparable as well.

Jurgen Pitaske <jpitaske@gmail.com> writes:
>On Monday, 18 October 2021 at 09:20:35 UTC+1, Anton Ertl wrote:
>> There is no exclusivity between products and DIY. Forth systems
>> designed for use by others ("mere users") like VFX have existed for
>> more than 4 decades just as DIY Forths have been built and continue to
>> be built.
>>
>> The same is true in other areas; e.g., cars have been commodity
>> products for the masses as well as objects for DIY projects. There
>> are also in-between cases, like kit cars, kit computers or IKEA
>> furniture.
....
>Anybody who is good enough in software can write a Forth - fine, often said here
....
>How are they supported?

Yes, that's a difference between products for others and DIY: users
tend to want support for a Forth system provided by someone else. If
they have done it themselves, they have to support it themselves (but
they also can).

>I do like your example of the DIY car.
>To put it on the road, you have to have it checked / MOTed.

Yes, people have killed themselves and others with cars in large
numbers, so they have been regulated (comparatively little compared to
e.g. railway or aviation regulations), but that's beside the point.
Despite the regulations and the increasingly inaccessible designs of
modern cars, there is still a lot that people do themselves on their
cars, and there are store chains just living off that market.

>So, please make a distinction between commercial world and DIY stuff
> - no matter how good they are.

I made a distinction between products for others, which includes
non-commercial products like Gforth, and DIY stuff that is made for
yourself (but you might build commercial or non-commercial products
for others on top of that). There is also the in-between cases like
fig-Forth, eForth and JonesForth that serve a similar function as
books that explain how to DIY.

You are apparently keen on making a distinction between commercial and
non-commercial Forth systems. That is a different distinction.

>And to try to put it into perspective:
>Which commercial projects have these non-commercial Forths be used in that the community knows about?

Gforth has been used for Open Firmware development by IBM and Apple
(and Forth, Inc. taught courses on Open Firmware that involved
Gforth).

- anton
--
M. Anton Ertl http://www.complang.tuwien.ac.at/anton/home.html
comp.lang.forth FAQs: http://www.complang.tuwien.ac.at/forth/faq/toc.html
New standard: http://www.forth200x.org/forth200x.html
EuroForth 2021: https://euro.theforth.net/2021

On Monday, 18 October 2021 at 14:27:46 UTC+1, Anton Ertl wrote:
> Jurgen Pitaske <jpit...@gmail.com> writes:
> >On Monday, 18 October 2021 at 09:20:35 UTC+1, Anton Ertl wrote:
> >> There is no exclusivity between products and DIY. Forth systems
> >> designed for use by others ("mere users") like VFX have existed for
> >> more than 4 decades just as DIY Forths have been built and continue to
> >> be built.
> >>
> >> The same is true in other areas; e.g., cars have been commodity
> >> products for the masses as well as objects for DIY projects. There
> >> are also in-between cases, like kit cars, kit computers or IKEA
> >> furniture.
> ...
> >Anybody who is good enough in software can write a Forth - fine, often said here
> ...
> >How are they supported?
>
> Yes, that's a difference between products for others and DIY: users
> tend to want support for a Forth system provided by someone else. If
> they have done it themselves, they have to support it themselves (but
> they also can).
> >I do like your example of the DIY car.
> >To put it on the road, you have to have it checked / MOTed.
> Yes, people have killed themselves and others with cars in large
> numbers, so they have been regulated (comparatively little compared to
> e.g. railway or aviation regulations), but that's beside the point.
> Despite the regulations and the increasingly inaccessible designs of
> modern cars, there is still a lot that people do themselves on their
> cars, and there are store chains just living off that market.
> >So, please make a distinction between commercial world and DIY stuff
> > - no matter how good they are.
> I made a distinction between products for others, which includes
> non-commercial products like Gforth, and DIY stuff that is made for
> yourself (but you might build commercial or non-commercial products
> for others on top of that). There is also the in-between cases like
> fig-Forth, eForth and JonesForth that serve a similar function as
> books that explain how to DIY.
>
> You are apparently keen on making a distinction between commercial and
> non-commercial Forth systems. That is a different distinction.
> >And to try to put it into perspective:
> >Which commercial projects have these non-commercial Forths be used in that the community knows about?
> Gforth has been used for Open Firmware development by IBM and Apple
> (and Forth, Inc. taught courses on Open Firmware that involved
> Gforth).
> - anton
> --
> M. Anton Ertl http://www.complang.tuwien.ac.at/anton/home.html
> comp.lang.forth FAQs: http://www.complang.tuwien.ac.at/forth/faq/toc.html
> New standard: http://www.forth200x.org/forth200x.html
> EuroForth 2021: https://euro.theforth.net/2021

So you are saying that
> Gforth has been used for Open Firmware development by IBM and Apple
> (and Forth, Inc. taught courses on Open Firmware that involved
> Gforth).
Just for design / testing or
Which IBM and Apple end product is GForth included in then as reference?
No generalities please, otherwise it sounds like Forth the secret weapon ...

Jurgen Pitaske <jpitaske@gmail.com> writes:
>Which IBM and Apple end product is GForth included in then as reference?

I have no idea if they included it in something that you might
consider an end product. I also don't know exactly what they have
been doing with it, but I know that they have been doing something
with it (there were contacts with both Apple and IBM), and elsewhere I
read that Gforth is/was used for processing the source of the firmware
into FCode (an encoded version); in that capacity I expect that they
distribute(d) Gforth with toolkit for third-party hardware developers.

- anton
--
M. Anton Ertl http://www.complang.tuwien.ac.at/anton/home.html
comp.lang.forth FAQs: http://www.complang.tuwien.ac.at/forth/faq/toc.html
New standard: http://www.forth200x.org/forth200x.html
EuroForth 2021: https://euro.theforth.net/2021