[Oberon] Need V4 Code for trivial task.

[Liam Proven]

On 14 December 2016 at 07:39, Lars <noreply at z505.com> wrote:
> Lisp and forth probably already have been replaced, or superseded,

Hardly. Sadly many quite poor languages -- over-complex, or unsafe, or
both -- have become very popular, but that doesn't mean that the older
ones have gone away. They are still around, still updated, still in
use.

> When Paul Graham wrote his Lisp shopping cart (the first one to exist on
> the internet apparently, Yahoo Stores, way way back in the day)

Yahoo Stores is what it was called after it was acquired and rewritten
-- just checking for clarity here.

> His startup got bought,

Yes, by Yahoo.

> and they converted the code from lisp to
> another language that modern developers could actually use and
> understand...

Yes. C. But see Greenblatt's Law.

> Since lisp is so bloody extensible and powerful, that's it's
> double edged sword: you can modify the living hell out of a lisp program,
> to the extent that no one actually understands what the lisp program is
> doing any more.

While this is true, it's also true of C. Any language can be hard to
read and obscure if not written in a clear style; and almost any can
be clear and readable if done well.

Perhaps not Intercal or Befunge. ;-)

> Also Lisp keeps getting replaced (or refined?) with new forks of itself.
> You've got Scheme, and then you've got Paul Graham's version of lisp...
> all these seem to be disciplined "rewrites" of lisp to try to put some
> sense in it so that it is more, disciplined...

There are dozens or hundreds: Racket, Arc, CGOL, PLOT, Qi, Shen, etc.

But actually, I suspect that there are only a few in serious widespread use:
* Clojure
* Common Lisp
* Emacs Lisp

So you can, sadly, ignore a lot of the noise.

> To be fair, the same thing (but different) happened with plain C. People
> forked it and created objective C and c++, and php, and other c variants,
> like Java... Java was an attempt to make C code more disciplined (or C++
> Rather).

In part. Java has different goals -- it's deepy object-oriented,
type-safe, runs in a managed VM, and so on.

More direct comparisons to C/C++ are Objective C and D. To Java, C#.

> As for Forth, I guess I don't know enough about it to comment, but pray
> tell, who in the hell even uses forth? There's like, what a total of.. how
> many Forth programmers...  Not to knock it or bash it, as again I don't
> know enough about it, but it just seems like... a niche language that very
> few use. Be interesting to find out how many people use it and for what
> purposes..

Millions, but they mostly don't know it.

It's part of OpenFirmware.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Firmware

All computers with SPARC and PowerPC processors, including millions of
Power Macs, and quite a few other RISC systems.

Sadly not common on x86 (where we got UEFI) or ARM (where there's no
standard firmware).

Forth is distantly related to Postscript, and that's in millions of
printers and imaging devices -- and forms the basis of the display
model of Mac OS X, in hundreds of millions of Apple computers.

http://wiki.c2.com/?ForthPostscriptRelationship


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