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Forth: The programming language that writes itself

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Re: Forth: The programming language that writes itself

#71

Post by stsquad »

In my first proper job as a software engineer I wrote a bunch of Forth for "fruit machines". I don't know what the US equivalent would be but they are low stakes gambling machines which are quite common in UK pubs. The core processor was a 6809 and Forth was chosen because the interpreter was super small and easy to implement. I really appreciated the quick interactive way you could update and tweak code as you tested it. I did get slightly weary of having to keep the state of the stack in your head as you DUP and SWAP stuff around but that was probably due to my inexperience and not decomposing things enough.

They continued to use Forth as the basis for their 68000 based video gaming machines although when it came to the hand classifier for video poker we ended up using C - mostly because we wanted to run a lot of simulations on one of these new fangled "Pentium" processors to make sure we got the prize distribution right to meet the target repayment rate of ~98%.

Re: Forth: The programming language that writes itself

#72

Post by 7thaccount »

praptak wrote: post #69

"Working without names (also known as implicit or tacit or point-free programming) is sometimes a more natural and less irritating way to compute. Getting rid of names can also lead to much more concise code. And less code is good code." Does Forth really reduce the burden of naming things? You don't name results but don't you have to pay for it with the burden of naming words? (My impression is that there's more wor…

The quote makes more sense IMO for array languages like J that support a tacit style. J's "trains" just make things flow without a lot of variables. Aaron Hsu's Co Dfns compiler (spoken about on here and YouTube) also uses this style with Dyalog APL.

Forth is concatenative, so you can build the words on top of each other without worrying about a ton of variables. So I think it's partially true for Forth.

Re: Forth: The programming language that writes itself

#73

Post by js8 »

CaptainOfCoit wrote: post #66
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…

> And we should aim for that, the babel tower of languages doesn't really help anyone. What exactly do you mean with this? That the amount of programming languages available isn't actually helpful, it's detrimental?

Well, I feel that lot of code is written again and again, just in different languages. If we could automatically compare and translate different implementations, I think it would be beneficial for finding bugs.

Everytime somebody comes up with a new programming language, I am like, yeah, so you added these abstraction, just in a different syntax. I think people who come up with new languages should implement the primitives on top of lambda calculus (which really is the simplest logical system we know), then we could potentially have automated translators between languages, and that way we could cater to everyone's preferences, and expand a standard library across different languages.

So in short, yes, I think proliferation of programming languages without formal understanding of their differences is detrimental to interoperability of our computer systems.

It would also allow wider notion of metaprogramming - automated manipulation of programs. For example, let's say I need to upgrade my source code from one interpreter version to another. If both interpreters are represented as a set of terms in lambda calculus, I can see how express one in the other, and formalize it as some kind of transformation. No more manual updates when something changes.

It would also allow to build a library of universal optimizations, etc. So I think programmers would benefit from having a single universal language.

Re: Forth: The programming language that writes itself

#74

Post by lproven »

CaptainOfCoit wrote: post #66
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…

> And we should aim for that, the babel tower of languages doesn't really help anyone. What exactly do you mean with this? That the amount of programming languages available isn't actually helpful, it's detrimental?

Certainly that is how I read it.

It divides effort, spreads it too thinly among too many disparate projects with essentially the same goals, and as a result, they all advance much more slowly.

Examples: how many successors to C are there now? Hare, Odin, Joy, Zig, Nim, Crystal, Jai, Rust, D... And probably as many again that are lower-profile or one-person efforts.

For a parallel example, consider desktop environments on FOSS xNix OSes.

I have tried to count and I found about 20.

A "desktop" here meaning that it provides a homogenous environment, including things like a file manager and tools to switching between apps, plus accessories such as text editors, media viewers, and maybe even an email client, calendar, and/or address book. I am trying to explicitly exclude simple window managers here.

The vast majority are simply re-implementations of the Windows 9x desktop. Taskbar along 1 edge of the screen, with buttons for open apps, start menu, system tray, hierarchical file explorer, a Control Panel app with icons for individual pages, etc.

This includes:

* KDE Plasma (and Trinity)

* GNOME Flashback (AKA GNOME Classic, including the Consort fork)

* Cinnamon

* Xfce

* Budgie

* MATE

* LXDE (including Raspberry Pi PIXEL)

* LXQt

* UKUI (from Ubuntu Kylin, openKylin, etc.)

* DDE (from Deepin but also UOS, Ubuntu DDE and others)

* Enlightenment (and Moksha etc.)

* ChromeOS Aura

And more that are now obsolete:

* EDE

* XPde

* Lumina

That's about 15, more if you count variants and forks. There are more.

The main differences are whether they use Gtk 2, 3 or 4, or Qt. That's it.

It's easier to count the ones that aren't visibly inspired by Windows >= 95:

* GNOME Shell, ElementaryOS's Pantheon, Ubuntu's Unity.

Arguably: GNUstep (whose project lead angrily maintains is not a desktop after all), and the long-dormant ROX Desktop...

So, arguably, 3 you can run on a modern distro today.

CDE is older than Linux or Free/NetBSD so doesn't count. I only know 1 distro that offers it, anyway: Sparky Linux.

MAXX Interactive Desktop looks interesting but it's not (yet?) FOSS.

All that effort that's gone into creating and maintaining 8-10 different Win9x desktops in C using Gtk. It's tragic.

And yet there is still no modern FOSS classic-MacOS desktop, or Mac OS X desktop, or GEM desktop, or Amiga desktop, or OS/2 Workplace Shell... it's not like inspiration is lacking. There are at least 3 rewrites of AmigaOS (AROS, MorphOS, AmigaOS 4.x) but despite so much passion nobody bothered to bring the desktop to Linux?

Defenders of each will vigorously argue that theirs is the best and there are good reasons why it's the best, I'm sure, but at the end of the day, a superset of all of the features of all of them would not be visibly different from any single one.

That's rather sad, IMHO.

Re: Forth: The programming language that writes itself

#75

Post by 7thaccount »

James_K wrote: post #57
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.

The difference between Forth and Lisp could not be more pronounced. Forth source code has entirely implicit structure, you can't even tell which function is called on which arguments. Lisp has entirely explicit structure which makes it much easier to read and edit. Lisp needs only a single primitive (lambda) to create the entire programming language, whereas Forth needs many primitives which break the core idea of th…

I think I'd agree from a mathematical perspective that lisp is more elegant, but implementation-wise, I really do like Forth's simplicity. They're both really cool.

Re: Forth: The programming language that writes itself

#76

Post by js8 »

Mountain_Skies wrote: post #70
CaptainOfCoit wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And we should aim for that, the babel tower of languages doesn't really help anyone. What exactly do you mean with this? That the amount of programming languages available isn't actually helpful, it's detrimental?

Everyone should be free to unite behind my choices. It's obviously what is best for everyone.

That's a rather cheap retort. I am not saying everybody should use raw untyped lambda calculus for their programming, just that we would all benefit if we could translate languages we use to and from it, because then we could interoperate with any other code, refactor it, etc.

Re: Forth: The programming language that writes itself

#77

Post by lproven »

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…

> Why is it that languages like this don't scale?

Stanislav Datskovskiy addressed this rather well:

https://www.loper-os.org/?p=69

Re: Forth: The programming language that writes itself

#78

Post by js8 »

lproven wrote: post #74
CaptainOfCoit wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And we should aim for that, the babel tower of languages doesn't really help anyone. What exactly do you mean with this? That the amount of programming languages available isn't actually helpful, it's detrimental?

Certainly that is how I read it. It divides effort, spreads it too thinly among too many disparate projects with essentially the same goals, and as a result, they all advance much more slowly. Examples: how many successors to C are there now? Hare, Odin, Joy, Zig, Nim, Crystal, Jai, Rust, D... And probably as many again that are lower-profile or one-person efforts. For a parallel example, consider desktop environment…

I feel the same, too many people doing similar stuff in slightly different syntax, too few people looking at how things are similar and could be unified.

I think it's time to look beyond syntax in programming and untyped lambda calculus is the simplest choice (that is universal and can easily express new abstractions).

Mathematics suffers to some extent from a similar problem, but recent formalization efforts are really tackling it.

Re: Forth: The programming language that writes itself

#79

Post by CaptainOfCoit »

js8 wrote: post #73
CaptainOfCoit wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And we should aim for that, the babel tower of languages doesn't really help anyone. What exactly do you mean with this? That the amount of programming languages available isn't actually helpful, it's detrimental?

Well, I feel that lot of code is written again and again, just in different languages. If we could automatically compare and translate different implementations, I think it would be beneficial for finding bugs. Everytime somebody comes up with a new programming language, I am like, yeah, so you added these abstraction, just in a different syntax. I think people who come up with new languages should implement the prim…

> Everytime somebody comes up with a new programming language, I am like, yeah, so you added these abstraction, just in a different syntax.

I got this feeling too, until I started to explore languages outside of the C/Algol-like syntaxes. There is a wide range of languages out there, from array languages to lisps, and they don't give me the feeling of "just a different syntax" but actually changed the way I think.

So yeah, I love lisp now and spend most of my days writing it, but it also comes with the downside that now Java, C# and Golang look more similar than different to each other.

> It would also allow to build a library of universal optimizations, etc. So I think programmers would benefit from having a single universal language.

I think assuming everyone would use the same hardware, same environment and same workflows to solve the same problems, this would make a lot of sense and would be hugely beneficial!

But in reality lots of problems need different solutions, which has to be made in different ways, by different people who think differently. So because the world is plural, we need many programming languages too. Overall I feel like that's a benefit.

Re: Forth: The programming language that writes itself

#80

Post by _vqpz »

stsquad wrote: post #71

In my first proper job as a software engineer I wrote a bunch of Forth for "fruit machines". I don't know what the US equivalent would be but they are low stakes gambling machines which are quite common in UK pubs. The core processor was a 6809 and Forth was chosen because the interpreter was super small and easy to implement. I really appreciated the quick interactive way you could update and tweak code as you teste…

We just refer to them as “slot machines” in the US
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