HP 71B FORTH/Assembler ROM

[robve]

(09-02-2022 10:50 PM)rprosperi Wrote:  Religious debates about language preferences and skills will always ensue in threads like this, and like true religious debates, everyone is of course right. And wrong. And well, will continue to pray in the same places.

Yes, I agree with everything you've said. But the funny thing is, we both like Forth. No religious wars here

I think it should be fine to point out some (maybe inconvenient) facts I've observed when working with students and professionals. Students sure have strong opinions about programming languages. But I don't, see (1) below. People sometimes get upset whenever mentioning just one tiny little thing that is demonstrably problematic with a programming language. Instead, one should know the strengths and weaknesses and pick the programming language that best suits the project goal to complete. It helps when programming languages are easier to pick up, but Forth tutorials are generally questionable, many are useless unless you're a total noob not knowing what a stack is.

Forth is great, but has some weaknesses (no worries, I won't sum these up here.)

1) footnote: because I enjoy(ed) teaching the subject (as well as many other, actually more theoretical subjects in CS), and enjoyed programming even more: (MS) Basic (80s), Fortran (80s+90s), Pascal (80s), Modula-3 (90s), Prolog (80s-present), C (80s-present), C++ (90s-present), Java (occasionally), Python (for hobby), Forth (for hobby), Lisp/Scheme (for hobby), Miranda/Haskell (90s mostly), Lua (2010s-present), Javascript (2010s-present only if I have to), Z80/6502/68000/SCxxxx assembly (80s-present). When combined, I wrote >2M of lines of code myself, since the 80s (I can provide links to prove). But that's not the point.

- Rob