There's a good but not-too-long topic on RPL (Reverse-Polish Lisp in this case) started a week and a half ago on the same site at
http://www.hpmuseum.org/forum/thread-1140.html .
Quote:
I got a kick out of seeing Garth over there, defending Forth's honor.
Many of the people on that forum are way beyond me in math, being the type that enjoy math for the sake of math itself rather than as the tool to understand the
really interesting stuff
. On one hand, it can be intimidating, and on the other hand they still sometimes seem to miss some really basic stuff and I wonder if they're kidding, or I'm afraid of coming across as talking down to them. After years on these forums though, I'm coming to understand from both sides of the fence that being quite knowledgeable in one thing doesn't mean a person is quite knowledgeable in
everything we think is related to it, so we often appreciate someone pointing something out, as long as it doesn't come with the message, "You idiot! Why didn't you know that?" There was a topic there a few days ago where someone was asking about clock speed-ups, and nobody mentioned the elephant in the room which was to just write more-efficient code. I gave the example of the Forth on my HP-71 which was poorly done and I was able to improve its performance a lot by re-defining many of the words, even as secondaries, not even as primitives (since I have not learned the Saturn processor's assembly language), and in the extreme case, I was still able to make its Forth word CHR$ 14 times as fast. Someone seemed to be genuinely surprised, apparently never having thought of writing more-efficient code!