[Gnu-arch-users] Re: arch roadmap 1 (and "what's tom up to")

[Miles Bader]

Aaron Bentley <address@hidden> writes:
>>     > - No one knows Furth
>> 
>> You do in the sense that it's a simpler and more general experession
>> of the essense of your favorite language.
>
> Until you've written code in Furth, even *you* don't really know it.  As 
> for me, I don't doubt that I could learn Furth, but I picked up Python a 
> month ago, and I'd rather focus on that.

So what if Tom had chosen, e.g., lua instead (which seems a good choice)?

> Furth raises the barrier to entry for tla development and possibly for
> Arch use as well.  It has the potential to reduce the pool of users
> and contributors to those who are willing to learn a new language.

I think this is a bit overblown.

For users, most probably will never see `furth code', it will simply
influence the config file formats a bit or whatever, and Tom's clueful
enough to keep those simple and straight-forward for common uses.

For people hacking on tla, I'd think furth would occupy a similar place
to tla's use of hackerlab instead of more common libc functions -- it
requires a slight amount of time to adjust too, but not very much, and
once you get used to it the extra functionality is very nice (probably
more so for furth than for hackerlab).  From what I see in Tom's
messages, the furth layer looks pretty small and straight-forward.

-Miles
-- 
Somebody has to do something, and it's just incredibly pathetic that it
has to be us.  -- Jerry Garcia