... physics. When the concepts are stretched beyond their breaking points, you do better to come up with workable concepts than to keep the contradictory ones and pretend you're doing OK. So we wind up with two physics. There's operational physics where you describe what you do and what results you get, where experiments are reasonably reproducible and whatever happens is what happens. And then ...

... it's pH 10.5, you have a problem. One or the other or both of your tests are not accurately measuring pH but measuring something else. If you call the result of both tests pH then you wind up with "The pH of this soil sample is 4.6 and 10.5". But go for the hard case: what happens when they're close, but not identical? The difficulty of dealing with this logically is ...

...'s pH 10.5, you have a problem. One or the other or both of your tests are not accurately measuring pH but measuring something else. If you call the result of both tests pH then you wind up with "The pH of this soil sample is 4.6 and 10.5". But go for the hard case: what happens when they're close, but not identical? The difficulty of dealing with this logically is ...

... If you call the result of both tests pH then you wind up with "The pH of this soil sample is 4.6 ... at the center of Berkeley's critique of calculus. Similarly, if you wind up claiming that the same political candidate is a reactionary conservative...makes that very easy if you're heading that direction anyway. You wind up with a great big pile of unmaintainable code that you...

...something else. If you call the result of both tests pH then you wind up with "The pH of this soil sample is 4.6 and 10.5". Similarly, if you wind up claiming that the same political candidate is a reactionary conservative and also...Forth makes that very easy if you're heading that direction anyway. You wind up with a great big pile of unmaintainable code that you can't...

... the mind of the user. If you start with the marketing, if you ask what customers think they want and how can you sell them the sizzle, you probably aren't going to wind up with a good virtual machine. You have to get deeper than that. I was recently asked to participate in a Stanford University "webinar" on innovation in space exploration. I gave the talk last week. This ...

...'s simple? You have to get into the mind of the user. If you start with the marketing, if you ask what customers think they want and how can you sell them the sizzle, you probably aren't going to wind up with a good virtual machine. I was talking to an old friend and colleague a couple of weeks ago. He used to be an avid Forth user. I asked him why he'd stopped. He had a ...

....uk> wrote: Jonah Thomas wrote: The Forth promise is that the extra thinking will pay off. That... will work together so that you'll wind up with less total work. Fewer ... for them, they may be right. The Forth Promise can't pay off except for programmers who think ... due to use of Forth would lie. [%%X] The promise of Forth should be manifest more in larger projects...

...'t strong and hand coded assembly can outperform a compiler. The Forth promise is that the extra thinking will pay off. That makes .... That the simplicities will work together so that you'll wind up with less total work. Fewer places for bugs to hide...> 1) "That the simplicities will work together so that you'll wind up with less total work." 2) "Fewer places for bugs ...

.... Somewhat "write-only", although not as bad as traditional Forth, I think. But for this, they would have had to act at the beginning --- not when they felt the wind of change. This is what most other small languages had. An injection into teaching right from the start. C? Started with OS, utilities, document processing. Teaching came later, after it had ...