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_Thinking Forth_ - discusses a bunch of ideas that didn't become popular until Fowler et. al invented them. (Incremental development, (re)"factoring", etc.) A

_Thinking Forth_ - discusses a bunch of ideas that didn't become popular until Fowler et. al invented them. (Incremental development, (re)"factoring", etc.) A lot of those ideas came from cross-pollination between the Forth and Smalltalk communities, didn't they? Just like many others came from Lisp.

gruseom 16y ago
Please assure me you omitted quotes from "invented" in some kind of ironic seizure. :) I'm not aware of any interaction between the Forth and Smalltalk communities, nor did I ever hear Forth referenced in oral histories along the Smalltalk->XP axis. It would be interesting if this were true. I bet your question reduces approximately to, "Was Ward Cunningham a Forth hacker?" Moore was influenced by both APL and (especially) Lisp, which he studied with McCarthy. But Forth predates Smalltalk, and the two moved in very different circles. Still do I guess. While I'm at it, I've been meaning to write the following down somewhere. Out of the great small, regular languages (Lisp, Smalltalk, APL, Forth, is that it?) Forth stands out as the only one that originated in working hackerdom and not a research environment. Forth is the incarnation of that design style in the land of the Von Neumann architecture, doubtless because Moore was a working programmer all those years, just trying to get things done. The remarkability of this fact has yet to be appreciated. Consider Lisp by contrast: it began existence far away from the machine and has been trying to find its way back ever since (or bring the machine up to it). With Lisp, bottom-up programming nonetheless starts pretty high up; Forth starts at rock bottom. That's important, and I wish more of us (myself included) had a better grasp of it. One could do worse than to make it the introduction to computing, or at least teach it alongside Scheme/Python/etc. I think it would be very exciting to young hackers to begin at the beginning in this way.
- silentbicycle 16y ago
  I think I read about Forth influencing Smalltalkers on the c2 wiki somewhere - IIRC, it had more to do with the problem solving approach than the language itself. I could be wrong, though. Edit: Found one reference - "It must have been ten years ago that I tried to explain the essence of Smalltalk to my brother, a Forth programmer. We found common ground by programming -- one day in Forth, another in Smalltalk. In Forth we wrote the essential Smalltalk: object identity and method dispatch; in Smalltalk we wrote the essential Forth: dictionary, words and builds-does. We both showed off our respective environments with great skill, pride and confidence. Oh, if only all programming could be so educational. -- WardCunningham". (http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?ForthInSmalltalk http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?ForthInSmalltalk) So yes, Ward Cunningham knew Forth, for one. As for other "great small, regular languages", there's also ML, Prolog, and SNOBOL. I haven't used SNOBOL for anything, but it AFAICT it introduced pattern matching, so it's been pretty influential. There's probably more good candidates in HOPL I and II. Maybe also awk. (And yes - the original version of the "invented" sentence was positively unctuous. ;) )

gruseom 16y ago

Please assure me you omitted quotes from "invented" in some kind of ironic seizure. :) I'm not aware of any interaction between the Forth and Smalltalk communities, nor did I ever hear Forth referenced in oral histories along the Smalltalk->XP axis. It would be interesting if this were true. I bet your question reduces approximately to, "Was Ward Cunningham a Forth hacker?" Moore was influenced by both APL and (especially) Lisp, which he studied with McCarthy. But Forth predates Smalltalk, and the two moved in very different circles. Still do I guess. While I'm at it, I've been meaning to write the following down somewhere. Out of the great small, regular languages (Lisp, Smalltalk, APL, Forth, is that it?) Forth stands out as the only one that originated in working hackerdom and not a research environment. Forth is the incarnation of that design style in the land of the Von Neumann architecture, doubtless because Moore was a working programmer all those years, just trying to get things done. The remarkability of this fact has yet to be appreciated. Consider Lisp by contrast: it began existence far away from the machine and has been trying to find its way back ever since (or bring the machine up to it). With Lisp, bottom-up programming nonetheless starts pretty high up; Forth starts at rock bottom. That's important, and I wish more of us (myself included) had a better grasp of it. One could do worse than to make it the introduction to computing, or at least teach it alongside Scheme/Python/etc. I think it would be very exciting to young hackers to begin at the beginning in this way.

silentbicycle 16y ago
I think I read about Forth influencing Smalltalkers on the c2 wiki somewhere - IIRC, it had more to do with the problem solving approach than the language itself. I could be wrong, though. Edit: Found one reference - "It must have been ten years ago that I tried to explain the essence of Smalltalk to my brother, a Forth programmer. We found common ground by programming -- one day in Forth, another in Smalltalk. In Forth we wrote the essential Smalltalk: object identity and method dispatch; in Smalltalk we wrote the essential Forth: dictionary, words and builds-does. We both showed off our respective environments with great skill, pride and confidence. Oh, if only all programming could be so educational. -- WardCunningham". (http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?ForthInSmalltalk http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?ForthInSmalltalk) So yes, Ward Cunningham knew Forth, for one. As for other "great small, regular languages", there's also ML, Prolog, and SNOBOL. I haven't used SNOBOL for anything, but it AFAICT it introduced pattern matching, so it's been pretty influential. There's probably more good candidates in HOPL I and II. Maybe also awk. (And yes - the original version of the "invented" sentence was positively unctuous. ;) )