Similar story here. Co-worker (German dude, very nice otherwise) was going to build OCR software from scratch using FORTH (1985 or so). After blowing the complete allotment of time for the project about a week before 'D' (demo) day I was asked if I could still make something that was demonstrable.
The problem wasn't all that hard actually so I wrote a bit of C code that did the job in about 2 working days...
Now, there is nothing wrong with FORTH per-se, it's a great little language and it has some elements that I think are super elegant, in the same way that I think LISP is super elegant (though I'd have a much easier time programming some problem in FORTH than in LISP simply because I have a lot more FORTH experience).
When I looked at the code I decided that FORTH was the wrong tool for that particular job, doing it in C (to great scorn of the original German dude who called C sneeringly a 'great' language because of the larger runtime) made the job very much easier.
The same 'it will work tomorrow' attitude was what kept the project going for all the time that went into it (multiple years), I think in part this was because the guy was so nice and a close buddy of one of the people that ran that place. But when push came to shove the un-elegant sledgehammer of C rammed that particular nail in in record time.
Image processing in FORTH is not the best fit, though I can see some ways in which you could make it fit. Maybe if I tried my hand at it by tomorrow I could have a working prototype ;)
The problem wasn't all that hard actually so I wrote a bit of C code that did the job in about 2 working days...
Now, there is nothing wrong with FORTH per-se, it's a great little language and it has some elements that I think are super elegant, in the same way that I think LISP is super elegant (though I'd have a much easier time programming some problem in FORTH than in LISP simply because I have a lot more FORTH experience).
When I looked at the code I decided that FORTH was the wrong tool for that particular job, doing it in C (to great scorn of the original German dude who called C sneeringly a 'great' language because of the larger runtime) made the job very much easier.
The same 'it will work tomorrow' attitude was what kept the project going for all the time that went into it (multiple years), I think in part this was because the guy was so nice and a close buddy of one of the people that ran that place. But when push came to shove the un-elegant sledgehammer of C rammed that particular nail in in record time.
Image processing in FORTH is not the best fit, though I can see some ways in which you could make it fit. Maybe if I tried my hand at it by tomorrow I could have a working prototype ;)
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