> Message: 1 > Date: Tue, 6 Oct 2009 15:21:17 +1300 > From: Chris Double <[email protected]> > Subject: Re: [Factor-talk] "Factor vs. Forth" --- the book > To: [email protected] > Message-ID: > <[email protected]> > Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 > It's an interesting read - I like seeing what a Forth programmers > perspective is on Factor. Personally I find your use of the term 'real > world' odd since the meaning is obviously different depending on the > type of development you do. To me, 'real world' is any application > that gets used. Including web applications (What I tend to use and > develop in Factor) and desktop applications. > > Some of the Factor examples could do with tweaking. One quick example > is your first definition of 'pars':
Thanks for the feedback. It is not my intention with this book to represent myself as the big Factor export. I am a Forth programmer first and foremost. I think that my book is useful primarily for comparing Factor to Forth, as the title suggests, and that I am the most appropriate author given my background in Forth. I am going to need some help with the Factor code though --- both you and Slava have already provided good rewrites for my pars function. If my inexperience in Factor makes me unqualified to write this book, then I will drop the project. That is largely up to the more experienced Factor programmers such as yourself --- whether or not they are willing to continue to provide rewrites and improvements for my Factor code that I include in the book. Slava did say that many people have started to write such a book, but that all of given up shortly thereafter. To a certain extent, I am writing this book for myself as much as for other people --- it is helping me to come to grips with Factor. As for my use of the term "real-world," that is pretty typical among people who do motion-control work. You may not be aware of this, but those folks consider desktop computers to be *Boring* with a capital `B'. This is also what a lot of non-technical people think. Over the summer I worked on a cattle ranch helping with the haying. When I told my boss that I normally work as a computer programmer, he said: "I don't know how you do it. That is just so boring, because you are just sitting there in front of the computer all day." This is despite the fact that he had spent the entire day sitting in front of a computer. In his tractor there is a computer connected to the round baler that he is pulling, that provides continuous information about what is going on back there. It tells him how fat the bale is on each end so that he can steer into the windrow correctly, so as to get a nice cylindrical bale that is not tapered, nor fat in the middle like a whiskey barrel. This is the real world though --- this has nothing to do with sitting in front of a computer at a desk --- he thinks that the baler is hella cool technology (it cost $40,000, so it ought to be). Of course, the avoidance of desktop computers can be taken to an extreme too. That guy's wife, who is the owner of the ranch, told me that she calculates her finances using a spreadsheet --- meaning a gigantic sheet of paper on the kitchen table. This is how her mother did it when she was alive, and most likely how her daughter does it, and how her grand-daughter will also do it when she grows up. That is actually somewhat ridiculous in the year 2009, though. :-) P.S. for Emeka --- I will provide a postscript or pdf file in addition to the dvi file for my next update. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Come build with us! The BlackBerry(R) Developer Conference in SF, CA is the only developer event you need to attend this year. Jumpstart your developing skills, take BlackBerry mobile applications to market and stay ahead of the curve. Join us from November 9 - 12, 2009. Register now! http://p.sf.net/sfu/devconference _______________________________________________ Factor-talk mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/factor-talk
