Discussion
If ever there was an application "made for Forth", surely it would be astroimaging
Chuck Moore invented Forth at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO)
FORTH Inc, and Leon Wagner are actively controlling radio dishes with Forth
There is a fertile professional-amateur collaboration in algorithms and techniques - very Forth!
Interesting technical aspects span from simple motor controllers through to sophisticated image manipulation algorithms
Forth-quality engineering “under the hood” would be a great practical benefit
Yet the case for Forth is perhaps not compelling
Hard to find any recent history of Forth being used in this field as a starting point
Access to all essential libraries will have to be “plumbed in” from nothing, even SQLite
Floating point, infix, mathematical algorithms need to be implemented “from the textbook”
What is the right approach for including Forth?
A longer, bottom-up project to develop a stack of astronomy-related data structures and libraries?
Development of Forth as a general inter-application “glue language”, rather like REXX or Amiga AREXX?
A niche tool for some local, small-scale problem solving (perhaps custom user hardware)?
What do you think?