RE: [colorforth] Some constructive criticism

[John Drake <jmdrake_98@xxxxxxxxx>]

--- Frédéric_DUBOIS <frederic.dubois@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:

> There's people on c.l.f. talking about the
> 'colorforth community' but I
> wonder if it really exists. A community suppose
> something in common and I
> wonder if we have even colorForth in common.

Right.  And there are people who share the
common interest of developing - understanding
- porting - using colorforth.

> I if
> nothing else subscribed
> this mailing list never ran the original Colorforth.

Fine.  Have you run any version?  I'm not saying
that's a requirement for "community membership"
but just curious.

> I'm more interested by
> the ideas in CF than in CF itself, and pick some to
> include them in my
> system. Well maybe it means that I'm not a true
> member of this community :)

You'd fall in my definition of community.  Of course
some might say since the community is so small
"family" might be a better term.  ;)

> I think that everyone will agree with you that a
> maintained page for
> ColorForth would be nice for us and anyway who would
> like to give it a try
> but I bet that everyone is just to busy to do it. On
> the other hand there
> are some people who had some time to setup nice
> pages around Colorforth on
> the Web and from time to time they update it.
> One solution I see is to let everyone contribute
> when he/she has time for it
> on a community site. 

You mean like a Wiki?  One already exists.  But you
won't find it simply from following links from
colorforth.com.

> It also could centralize
> Colorforth related links, too.
> If you really want it, start it up yourself.

Again this is done at the Wiki.  But without a
link to it who will know?

Still your suggestion did give me an idea.
What about a ColorForth webring?  Of course
that will still require a link at colorforth.com
but after that it would be self-maintaining.
Come to think of it a Web-ring is probably
a better idea anyway.  A direct link to a
site might be seen as an "endorsement" of
the content on a particular site.  But a
link to a webring is more like saying
"Here's a family of similair websites".
 
> Mark Slickers, Howerd Oakford ( are you here?) and
> Roman Pavlyuk have done a
> pretty good job to let people try Colorforth; the
> hardware compatibility
> issues are no more a problem if you want to discover
> CF. The very last thing
> that prevent the mainstream newbie from having a
> deep look at Colorforth is
> the keyboard layout. IIRC Jeff wrote in c.l.f. that
> ColorForth was really
> for everyone. The unusual keyboard layout probably
> shows some important
> concepts or techniques but IMO it also makes it not
> for everyone, but for
> anyone seriously interested in it. I regret that the
> mainstream Forth
> program discards CF that I consider the
> state-of-the-art of Forth, just
> because it is too hard to type something in. I bet
> CF would become
> instantaneously popular with a standard QWERTY
> layout.
> 
> Just my 0.02EUR...
> 
>  Amicalement,
>   Frederic

Well if you're talking colorforth the "language" 
as opposed to colorforth the "system" there are 
already implementations that use QWERTY.  Sean
Pringles Enth/Flux (standalone) system comes 
to mind as well as Terry Lovell's 4word (DOS) 
system and Richard Collins c4w (Windows) system.
Enth/Flux even lets you mix ColorForth and ANS
Forth code.  Still a QWERTY mapping might be
usefull for some things. 

Regards,

John M. Drake

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