From: anton@mips.complang.tuwien.ac.at (Anton Martin Ertl)
Subject: Re: An Open ANSI Forth Implementation
Organization: Institut fuer Computersprachen, Technische Universitaet Wien
Date: Tue, 28 Jul 1992 08:05:14 GMT

In article <3939.UUL1.3#5129@willett.pgh.pa.us>, ForthNet@willett.pgh.pa.us (ForthNet articles from GEnie) writes:
|> Category 10,  Topic 41
|> Message 10        Fri Jul 24, 1992
|> D.RUFFER [Dennis]            at 19:34 EDT
[I wrote:]
|>  > Could you present evidence for your premise that commercial
|>  > success of a language comes from vendor profit?
|>  >
|>  > Looking at the languages currently in commercial use, I see that
|>  > it's the other way round: first the language became popular
|>  > (usually in academia), then it became commercially used and then
|>  > vendors could make a profit (in spite of free or low-cost
|>  > academic and hobbyist implementations).  This is true for Pascal,
|>  > C, and in some sense also for FORTRAN.
|> 
|> Anton, Mitch will probably respond also, but I think you are _very_ far off
|> base with your assumption.  I have not followed Pascal's development and can't
|> get to a library at the moment, but I think that is the _only_ language that
|> fits your remark.  C was _only_ written so that Unix could be developed _and_
|> it was pushed heavily by AT&T which is about the biggest vendor I could
|> imagine.  They gave it to universities so that they could force it to be
|> popular. That would also work for Forth, if we have an AT&T behind it, but we
|> don't so it hasn't.

I don't think your argument supports Mitch's point that free
implementations hurt a language, on the contrary.

Even if AT&T "pushed heavily" (which I doubt), it would not have done
them any good. No vendor can force the universities to accept
something they think is wrong. Otherwise the language of academia
would be PL/1.

Also, note that the commercial development of UNIX (and environment,
e.g. the C compiler) was done by a different group of AT&T once the
system was popular, i.e. the language made popular by a free research
prototype was taken up by a commercial vendor. Does it make any
difference that they were in the same company? IMO no.

To return to the original point, how much profit did AT&T make from C?
Has this profit suffered from GNU C? Has C's popularity suffered from
GNU C? Hardly.

|>  Does anyone even remember how FORTRAN started and are
|> they still alive today? ;)  I doubt there even were university courses for
|> software back in them days and in those days, it was most likely a computer
|> manufacturer (probably IBM) who made the languages so that they could sell the
|> computer.

You got it quite right. You can find the story in HOPL(-I). FORTRAN
does not really fit in the model I have presented. It's implementation
was a large project (~25 person-years), explicitly set up by IBM to
support hardware sales (i.e.  no researchy type more-or-less personal
project like C). It was freely available, but only on IBM machines (at
first :-). Backus (the project leader) is still alive. He now does
research in functional programming and automatic program construction.

@Book{hopl81,
  title = 	"History of Programming Languages",
  publisher = 	"ACM Press",
  year = 	"1981",
  editor = 	"Richard L. Wexelblatt",
}

-- 
M. Anton Ertl                    Some things have to be seen to be believed
anton@mips.complang.tuwien.ac.at Most things have to be believed to be seen