Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Forth: The programming language that writes itself

ratfactor.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 174 posts

Re: Forth: The programming language that writes itself

#31

Post by mek6800d2 »

codys wrote: post #22
kragen wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ${1}q (I converted a newline to `$'\n'` for readability, but the original pipeline from the article works fine on a current MacOS system) 1: https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/5948.315654

With great respect to Doug McIlroy (in the CACM article), the shell pipeline has a serious problem that Knuth's Pascal program doesn't have. (I'm assuming Knuth's program is written in standard Pascal.) You could have compiled and run Knuth's program on an IBM PC XT running MS-DOS; indeed on any computer having a standard Pascal compiler. Not so the shell pipeline, where you must be running under an operating system with pipes and 4 additional programs: tr, sort, uniq, and sed.

McIlroy also discusses how a program "built for the ages" should have "a large factor of safety". McIlroy was worried about how Knuth's program would scale up to larger bodies of text. Also, Bentley's/McIlroy's critique was published in 1986, which I think was well before there was a major look into Unix tools and their susceptibility to buffer overruns, etc. In 1986, could people have determined the limits of tr, sort, uniq, sed, and pipes--both individually and collectively--when handling large bodies of text? With a lot of effort, yes, but if there was a problem, Knuth at least only had one program to look at. With the shell pipeline, one would have to examine the 4 programs plus the shell's implementation of pipes.

(I'm not defending Pascal and Knuth, Bentley, and McIlroy are always worth reading on any topic -- thanks for posting the link!)

Bringing this back to Forth, Bernd Paysan, who needs no introduction to the people in the Forth community, wrote "A Web-Server in Forth", https://bernd-paysan.de/httpd-en.html . It only took him a few hours, but in fairness to us mortals, it's an HTTP request processor that reads a single HTTP request from stdin, processes it, and writes it output to stdout. In other words, it's not really a full web server because it depends on an operating system with an inetd daemon for all the networking. As with McIlroy's shell pipeline, there is a lot of heavy lifting done by operating system tools. (Paysan's article is highly recommended for people learning Forth, like me when I read it back in the 2000s.)

Re: Forth: The programming language that writes itself

#32

Post by lutusp »

nikolay wrote: post #5

Many people glorify the simplicity of Lisp as an interpreter, but Forth is similar and underappreciated. Sadly, the only code I've written in Forth is... PostScript. Yeah, PostScript is a dialect of Forth. As a child, I really was amused by the demo of GraFORTH on Apple ][, which included 3D wireframe animations, which at the time were magical.

> As a child, I really was amused by the demo of GraFORTH on Apple ][, which included 3D wireframe animations, which at the time were magical.

I originally wrote GraFORTH (https://archive.org/details/a2_GraFORTH_1981_Lutus_Paul) to escape the slow world of integer BASIC on my first computer (an Apple II). Because it relied on large blocks of assembly code to produce nice graphics, it perhaps misled people about what Forth could do on its own.

Later I wrote a variation I called TransFORTH (https://mirrors.apple2.org.za/ftp.apple.asimov.net/documenta...) that supported floating-point. I intended to combine GraFORTH and TransFORTH, but my computer didn't have enough RAM.

Innocent times, different world, before the personal computing tail began wagging the dog.

Re: Forth: The programming language that writes itself

#33

Post by socalgal2 »

behnamoh wrote: post #3

Why 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'm not entirely sure this is different from other languages but I believe a common complaint about lisp is every solution ends up writing a DSL for that solution, making it hard to understand for anyone else. So it's a super power if you're a small team and especially if you're a team of 1. But if you're a large team it doesn't scale.

Re: Forth: The programming language that writes itself

#34

Post by pjmlp »

behnamoh wrote: post #3

Why 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…

Sadly our industry carries mostly about brick layers and usually tries to go into technologies that make it easier to deal with employees like replaceable servants at low wage prices.

The large scale salaries SV style isn't something that you will find all over the globe, in many countries the pay is similar across all office workers, regardless if they are working with Git, or Office.

Re: Forth: The programming language that writes itself

#35

Post by zovirl »

behnamoh wrote: post #3

Why 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 was lucky, early in my career, to work at a place which used a lot of Perl and to read Damian Conway’s book, Object Oriented Perl. It was an amazing, mind-expanding book for me. It was filled with examples of different approaches to object-oriented programming, more than I ever dreamt existed, and it showed how to implement them all in Perl.

So much power! And right in line with Perl’s mantra, “there’s more than one way to do it.”

Unfortunately, our codebase contained more than one way of doing it. Different parts of the code used different, incompatible object systems. It was a lot of extra work to learn them all and make them work with each other.

It was a relief to later move to a language which only supported a single flavor of object-oriented programming.

Re: Forth: The programming language that writes itself

#36

Post by js8 »

I used to be a fan of these languages like Lisp and Forth and Joy (and Factor and Haskell), but then I found that what I a really long for is just (untyped) lambda calculus (as a universal language). (Combinatory logic is just a similar representation of lambda calculus, but the differences go away quickly once you start abstracting stuff.)

I think expressing semantics of all (common) programming languages in lambda calculus would give us a solid foundation for automated program translation. And we should aim for that, the babel tower of languages doesn't really help anyone.

The current issue I have is with type theory. So I am trying to embed notion of types directly into the lambda terms, so they would sort of "automatically typecheck" when composed. The crucial in this, in my opinion, are lambda terms that do not use lambda abstraction in their body, because you can think of these terms as a kind of mini-DSLs that have yet to be interpreted.

Anyway, once we can translate calculus of constructions (and other common formal logics) into untyped lambda calculus, it will also help us doing automated theorem proving. It must be theoretically possible, but to my knowledge nobody has really done this sort of hardcore formalization.

Re: Forth: The programming language that writes itself

#37

Post by vlovich123 »

pjmlp wrote: post #34
behnamoh wrote: post #3

Why 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…

Sadly our industry carries mostly about brick layers and usually tries to go into technologies that make it easier to deal with employees like replaceable servants at low wage prices. The large scale salaries SV style isn't something that you will find all over the globe, in many countries the pay is similar across all office workers, regardless if they are working with Git, or Office.

That argument implies that you would actually see these languages in communities with large SV style salaries which isn’t the case.

It turns out that “brick layer” languages are also easier to understand not just for the next person taking over but yourself after a few months. That’s valuable even to yourself unless you value your time at 0.

Re: Forth: The programming language that writes itself

#38

Post by procaryote »

js8 wrote: post #36

I used to be a fan of these languages like Lisp and Forth and Joy (and Factor and Haskell), but then I found that what I a really long for is just (untyped) lambda calculus (as a universal language). (Combinatory logic is just a similar representation of lambda calculus, but the differences go away quickly once you start abstracting stuff.) I think expressing semantics of all (common) programming languages in lambda…

Why specifically untyped?

Re: Forth: The programming language that writes itself

#39

Post by procaryote »

behnamoh wrote: post #3

Why 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…

Powerful languages invites people to do needlessly complex things. Needlessly complex things are harder to understand. Harder to understand is worse.

Code that matters is usually read and extended many more times than it is written, over time by different people, so being straightforward beats most other things in practice

Re: Forth: The programming language that writes itself

#40

Post by pjmlp »

vlovich123 wrote: post #37
pjmlp wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sadly our industry carries mostly about brick layers and usually tries to go into technologies that make it easier to deal with employees like replaceable servants at low wage prices. The large scale salaries SV style isn't something that you will find all over the globe, in many countries the pay is similar across all office workers, regardless if they are working with Git, or Office.

That argument implies that you would actually see these languages in communities with large SV style salaries which isn’t the case. It turns out that “brick layer” languages are also easier to understand not just for the next person taking over but yourself after a few months. That’s valuable even to yourself unless you value your time at 0.

Why? The less the VCs have to spend with employees the better.

See the famous quote about Go's target audience, or 2000's Java being a blue colour job language.

Not only do languages like Lisp, Forth, Smalltalk require a people to actually get them, a bit like the meme with burritos in Haskell, they suffered from bad decisions from companies pushing them.

Lisp suffered with Xerox PARC, Symbolics and TI losing against UNIX workstations, followed by the first AI Winter, which also took Japan's 5th project with Prolog alongside with it.

Smalltalk was getting alright outside Xerox PARC, with big name backers like IBM, where it had a major role on OS/2, similar to .NET on Windows, until Java came out, and IBM decided to pivot all their Smalltalk efforts into Java, Eclipse has roots on Visual Age for Smalltalk.

Post reply on HN