A long read but one that's quite incredible. Has definitely helped my understanding of computing get closer to the metal so to speak.
Forth: The programming language that writes itself
21–30 of 174 posts
Re: Forth: The programming language that writes itself
#22Why is it that languages like this don't scale? It's not the first time I see a powerful language that got forgotten. Other examples include SmallTalk and Common Lisp (tiny community). It is because some languages are "too powerful"? What does that say about our industry? That we're still not that advanced of a specie to be able to handle the full power of such languages? I say that because it seems languages that ar…
I think those other languages have real advantages you aren't seeing. —·— The other day akkartik wrote an implementation of the program Knuth used to introduce literate programming to the CACM readers: https://basiclang.solarpunk.au/d/7-don-knuths-original-liter... It just tells you the top N words by frequency in its input (default N=100) with words of the same frequency ordered alphabetically and all words converte…
The article in CACM that presents Knuth's solution [1] also includes some criticism of Knuth's approach, and provides an alternate that uses a shell pipeline:
tr -cs A-Za-z $'\n' |
tr A-Z a-z |
sort |
uniq -c |
sort -rn |
sed ${1}q
Re: Forth: The programming language that writes itself
#23I wish "Simple Made Easy," by Rich Hickey, could be applied here. Forth is simple but not easy. If there is something as simple as Forth but also accessible to mere mortals (aka easy) then I'd like to know what it is (I don't consider Clojure itself as a language to be simple in this sense).
Re: Forth: The programming language that writes itself
#24Back in 2004 or so - ancient days now - I remember an elderly programmer on
#gobolinux (freenode IRC back in the days) who kept on praising Forth. I never
understood why, but he liked Forth a lot.
Now - that in itself doesn't mean a whole lot, as it is just anecdotal, but people who are very passionate about programming languages are quite rare. I've not seen something like that happen with any other language (excluding also another guy on #gobolinux who liked Haskell). I did not see anyone praise, say, PHP, perl, JavaScript etc....
Some languages people don't like to talk about much. Forth though was different in that regard. I never got into it; I feel it has outlived the modern era like many other languages, but that guy who kept on talking about it I still remember. His website also was built in Forth and it was oddly enough kind of an "interactive" website (perhaps he also used JavaScript, I forgot, but I seem to remember he said most or all of it was implemented in Forth - turtles all down the way).
Re: Forth: The programming language that writes itself
#25[dead]
Re: Forth: The programming language that writes itself
#26Earlier quoted context omitted.
It kinda happened with markup languages. HTML, SVG, and some other domain specific markup languages are all XML, which is a subset of SGML. The thing there is those DSLs have their own specs. Coding is a social activity. Reading code is hard. When there are multiple ways of doing things, it's extra hard. People want to have relatively standardized ways of doing things so they can share code and reason about it easier…
HTML uses a ton of SGML features not part of XML (sometimes erroneously though to be non-standard ‘tag soup’, not to mention self-closing tags). You need either a specialized parser or an SGML processor + DTD.
Wasn't HTML4 the last one defined as a SGML DTD? 5 and on is its own beast.
(rip XHTML)
Re: Forth: The programming language that writes itself
#27Why is it that languages like this don't scale? It's not the first time I see a powerful language that got forgotten. Other examples include SmallTalk and Common Lisp (tiny community). It is because some languages are "too powerful"? What does that say about our industry? That we're still not that advanced of a specie to be able to handle the full power of such languages? I say that because it seems languages that ar…
What I heard is with Forth, basically no 2 environments are alike, but highly customized, meaning every forth programmer creates his own language in the end for his custom needs. So collaborating is a bit hard like this. The only serious forth programmer that I know, lives alone in the woods doing his things. So from a aesthetic point of view, I really like the language, but for getting things done, especially in a c…
This is not a real issue, because the same thing can be said about C. No two C projects are the same, each has its own set of libraries, macros, types, etc.
I think the main problem is that Forth systems don't have a standard way of creating interfaces like C and other languages have. So the diversity of environments becomes a big issue because it's difficult to combine libraries from different sources.
Re: Forth: The programming language that writes itself
#28I've had a soft spot for Forth and am toying with a silly Forth-like interpreter for web programming ... if not for actual use, at least for some fun time. One concept it adds is the notion of a "current selection" which can define the available vocabulary to use and is used to select and work with DOM elements. Just experimenting.
https://github.com/srikumarks/pjs
Edit: As a kid, I disliked BASIC as a language though it let me do fun stuff. So I made an interpreter in BASIC for a language I'd like and it turned out Forth-like (and I didn't know about Forth at that time). I guess I'm still that kid some 35 years later.
Re: Forth: The programming language that writes itself
#29Why is it that languages like this don't scale? It's not the first time I see a powerful language that got forgotten. Other examples include SmallTalk and Common Lisp (tiny community). It is because some languages are "too powerful"? What does that say about our industry? That we're still not that advanced of a specie to be able to handle the full power of such languages? I say that because it seems languages that ar…
I don't think "power" is really that helpful a metric in determining how useful a programming language is. If you think of programming from the standpoint of trying to specify the program you want out of all of the possibly programs you could write, one of the most helpful things a programming language can do is eliminate programs that you don't want by making them impossible to write. From that standpoint, constrain…
And at the extremes, too much power makes a tool less useful. I don’t drive an F1 car to work, I don’t plant tulips with an excavator, I don’t use a sledgehammer when hanging a picture. Those tools are all too powerful for the job.
Re: Forth: The programming language that writes itself
#30it mentions sometimes not naming things as great, but... what does naming intermediate values in forth look like? Is there even a naming scope that would allow for me to give values names in case I don't want to get entirely lost in the sauce?