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Forth: The programming language that writes itself

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Re: Forth: The programming language that writes itself

#101

Post by entaloneralie »

tromp wrote: post #95
entaloneralie wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of languages(including forth) maps really poorly to LC. Read some of the Forth writing on portability at all costs: http://www.ultratechnology.com/antiansi.htm

Simple pure concatenative languages map quite well though [1]. [1] https://github.com/tromp/AIT/blob/master/ait/mlatu.lam

Joy, right? Not Forth.

Conversion between spagetti stacks and pure stack programming(in which the stack contains numbers and no GC) has a massive translation cost if you go from LC to Forth and back.

Re: Forth: The programming language that writes itself

#102

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

Re: Forth: The programming language that writes itself

#104

Post by justin66 »

js8 wrote: post #76
Mountain_Skies wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Has even a single programming language made the complete documentation and implementation effort you're describing? It'd be interesting to read about.

Re: Forth: The programming language that writes itself

#105

Post by a96 »

rpcope1 wrote: post #16

If you like Forth, but find it challenging to build real stuff with, Factor ( https://factorcode.org/ ) is most or all of the good stuff about Forth designed in a way that's much easier to do things with. It was designed by Slava Pestov (who I think had a big hand in Swift), and honestly it's a lot of fun to build webapps and other programs with, and much less brutal to read than Forth can be.

I had to have a peek if it's all just web. Apparently, no.

https://concatenative.org/wiki/view/Factor/UI

> The Factor UI is a GUI toolkit together with a set of developer tools, written entirely in Factor, implemented on top of a combination of OpenGL and native platform APIs: X11, Win32 and Cocoa.

> UI gadgets are rendered using the cross-platform OpenGL API, while native platform APIs are used to create windows and receive events. The platform bindings can be also used independently; X11 binding has also been used in a Factor window manager, Factory, which is no longer maintained. The Cocoa binding is used directly by the webkit-demo vocabulary in Factor.

Fascinating. Probably dead and no mention of Wayland, but fascinating.

Re: Forth: The programming language that writes itself

#106

Post by tonyedgecombe »

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.

>Yeah, PostScript is a dialect of Forth.

My understanding is they were developed independently.

Re: Forth: The programming language that writes itself

#107

Post by username223 »

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 don't think there's a unifying reason why programming languages languish in obscurity; it's certainly not because they're "too powerful." What does "powerful" even mean? I used to care more about comparing programming languages, but I mostly don't these days. Actually used/useful languages mostly just got lucky: C was how you wrote code for Unix; Python was Perl but less funny-looking; Ruby was Rails; JavaScript is your only choice in a web browser; Lisp had its heyday in the age of symbolic AI.

Forth and (R4RS) Scheme are simple to implement, so they're fun toys. Some other languages like Haskell have interesting ideas but don't excel at solving any particular problems. Both toy and general-purpose programming languages are plentiful.

Re: Forth: The programming language that writes itself

#108

Post by rpcope1 »

kragen wrote: post #20
rpcope1 wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I worked at a place that had a big Forth codebase that was doing something mission critical. It was really neat and cool once you finally got it, and probably hundreds or maybe thousands of people had touched it, worked on it and learned it, but the ramp was pretty brutal for your average developer and thus someone decided it would be better to build the same thing over with a shitty almost-C-but-not-quite interprete…

That sounds interesting! Do you have any tips for us on how to use Forth effectively? What was the codebase?

Honestly, when I write forth now, which is usually for embedded targets, I've got a customized version of zforth that I've grafted some stuff like locals into. If it's a small program, it's better to not be afraid of things like globals, and just spend at least twice as much time factoring, writing comments and thinking than writing. It's important to read other people's Forth code and try to understand, as there's a zen and style that looks very different than how you'd write something like Java. It's freeing and enlightening once it clicks, but you have to fight a ton of the way you think about "normal" code.

As far as the codebase, I probably shouldn't say too much (may it's been long enough now, but Idk), but all I'll say is that was a important part of things at a certain disk drive manufacturer.

Re: Forth: The programming language that writes itself

#109

Post by area51org »

vertnerd wrote: post #89

I was captivated by the August 1980 issue of Byte magazine, which had a cover dedicated to Forth. It was supposed to be easy to implement, and I imagined I might do that with my new KIM-1 6502 board. Alas, the KIM-1 was lost when I went to college, and life forced me down different pathways for the next 45 years. About a year ago I finally began to work on my dream of a Forth implementation by building a Forth-based…

I had that issue, and I think I still might have it in my closet. (Weren't those Robert Tinney covers amazing?)

I always wanted to try out Forth but had no real opportunity. Maybe I should now?

Re: Forth: The programming language that writes itself

#110

Post by Zambyte »

cjfd wrote: post #64
lycopodiopsida wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> One thing I note is that all of the languages you name are very far from the machine Common lisp is one step away from assembly - you disassemble any function and it is, in fact, a valid strategy of one wants to check the compiler optimizations.

I googled a bit on how common lisp is compiled. Apparently it is possible to add some sort of type hints and ensure that parameters/variables have a certain type. If one uses that for most code, it would potentially be enough to qualify as being close to the machine.

What does "close to the machine" mean to you?
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