Re: future computers (sorta OT)

[Jeff Fox <fox@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Dear MISC readers:

Greg Alexander wrote:

> every new job I get I see a mass of badly-designed code and I'm simply
> shocked that someone could be so brilliant as to force such a horrible
> mess into working (while so stupid to write such a bad mess in the first
> place).  I think this is something they don't teach in academia. :)

Perhaps not in the US where everything is "cheap" and no one
cares about efficiency or costs.  It reminds me of how different
things are in Russia where many more people have had exposure
to Forth.  It seems that it was one of the ways that 
they competed with US in the arms race in the old days.  I
have heard lots of stories now that some of it has been
declassified.

One bit of trivia to suggest the magnitude of the difference
was that Sergei Baranakov (sp?) wrote a nice book on Forth
in Russian and it sold out 100,000 copies in a week or two.
In the US there is so little market for books on Forth that they
are collector items!

Jeff Fox