> I'm the person who was dissecting colorforth, a dead frog. The comment from Jeff Fox is totally unfair. The only reason I did it was THAT COLORFORTH JUST DIDN'T RUN ON THE THREE MACHINES I HAD AVAILABLE. And he nor Chuck Moore had any consideration with people like me or would waste their time helping me get colorforth up and running. I never managed to run colorforth, until such time as others made an emulation environment to boot a floppy image under windows. (Did you know that colorforth is just a floppy image?)
Lack of adoption seems hardly surprising under these circumstances.
Intuition refers to some sort of understanding that arrives without reasoning or evidence.
Very little is actually intuitive. Someone once said that the only intuitive user interface is the nipple. But babies have to learn how to latch on; if it's so intuitive, why do we have breastfeeding clinics?
Humor may be intuitive. Why does a three-month-old chuckle when someone sneezes? Nobody taught them that it's supposed to be funny, or what funny is.
> What does this say about Forth? Not much except that it isn't for me. Take Prolog. I know few things more insulting than having to code in Prolog. Whereas Armstrong developed Erlang in Prolog and liked it much better than reimplementing Erlang in C for speed. I can't imagine how this could be, but this is how it was. People are different.
People are different. Programming is building a model in your head then transferring that to a set of machine actions. (See "Programming as theory building", https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10833278 ) It appears that different people's head-models are radically different, and that what they find easy is different.
This renders discussions about "intuitive" moot, because it's no longer universal. To whom is it intuitive? You can define a target audience and survey them to find it out, or you can guess that what's intuitive to you is intuitive to others - but you can't guarantee it will be intuitive to everyone.
Further down:
> This is Forth. Seriously. Forth is not the language. Forth the language captures nothing, it's a moving target. Chuck Moore constantly tweaks the language and largely dismisses the ANS standard as rooted in the past and bloated. Forth is the approach to engineering aiming to produce as small, simple and optimal system as possible, by shaving off as many requirements of every imaginable kind as you can.
This appears to be the key to the productivity claims: junking requirements along the way. That also matches the broader experience of software engineering: you can be very productive writing for yourself at one end, but on the other there are colossal state megaprojects that never work because the requirements are incoherent and immovable. Hence "agile": what agile really provides is an opportunity every week or two to chip away at the requirements until something deliverable is decided upon.
> MD5 presents a few problems for programming a Green Arrays device. For one thing it depends on modulo 32 bit addition and rotation. Green Arrays chips deal in 18 bit quantities. For another, MD5 is complicated enough that neither the code nor the set of constants required to implement the algorithm will fit into one or even two or three nodes of a Green Arrays computer.
That is .. not for everybody.