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Thinking Forth (1984)

thinking-forth.sourceforge.net

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Re: Thinking Forth (1984)

#21

Post by armitron »

Gordonjcp wrote: post #12
AmalgatedAmoeba wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IIRC WebAssembly is at least partially inspired by Forth — both in syntax and being stack-based.

Python too, and of course PostScript.

Python has nothing to do with Forth, they couldn't be more opposite to each other if they tried. I recall Chuck Moore in a Silicon Valley Forth Interest Group meeting express his disappointment at how modern programming languages (and Python was among the ones mentioned) that are advertised as "simple" are anything but.

Python is an enormously complex language, full of inconsistencies and bad design. However, it masks that complexity behind a facade of user-friendliness which has done wonders for its popularity. Forth is not only as simple as it gets, but also an elegant and totally honest language. That Chuck Moore managed to distill the essence of programming in this form, speaks to his genius. Unfortunately, as is often the case with genius, it can be decades to centuries until the ideas percolate and emerge in a popular fashion.

Re: Thinking Forth (1984)

#22

Post by unsafecast »

account-5 wrote: post #16

I'd love to learn (a) Forth. As a beginner, where do you begin? Like Lisp there seems to be different variants. I always struggle with where to start.

Write one! Forths are so simple that you can write one in minutes if you understand it, and a bit more if you don't know anything about it. Having your own forth is both really gratifying, and gives you an opportunity to play around with the internals and change things up to see what happens (and why the choices made were made).

Forth is one of the languages where you have to know the internals to write it, but the internals are really simple.

Re: Thinking Forth (1984)

#23

Post by Gordonjcp »

armitron wrote: post #21
Gordonjcp wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Python too, and of course PostScript.

Python has nothing to do with Forth, they couldn't be more opposite to each other if they tried. I recall Chuck Moore in a Silicon Valley Forth Interest Group meeting express his disappointment at how modern programming languages (and Python was among the ones mentioned) that are advertised as "simple" are anything but. Python is an enormously complex language, full of inconsistencies and bad design. However, it mask…

> Python has nothing to do with Forth, they couldn't be more opposite to each other if they tried

Really? You don't look at the stack machine that runs the .pyc files and go "jeez this is just Forth with some syntactic sugar on"?

Re: Thinking Forth (1984)

#24

Post by teddyh »

nickcw wrote: post #18
account-5 wrote: post #16

I'd love to learn (a) Forth. As a beginner, where do you begin? Like Lisp there seems to be different variants. I always struggle with where to start.

I'd recommend gforth. It runs on lots of systems and is well maintained. https://gforth.org/ Eventually you'll build your own forth (seems to be a right of passage!)

“rite of passage”

Re: Thinking Forth (1984)

#25

Post by vrnvu »

I love Chuck Moore's minimalism applied to programming. [^1][^2] It goes hand in hand with the UNIX philosophy of keeping things simple that we can see in other software (linux) or languages (LISP, Go, Erlang )...

Also, I've always said that `Thinking Forth` is great for beginners even nowadays. It was published in the 80s yes. But it touches several "modern" topics like unit testing, function composition, modular design...

[^1]http://www.ultratechnology.com/method.htm [^2]http://www.ultratechnology.com/forththoughts.htm

Re: Thinking Forth (1984)

#26

Post by jabits »

unsafecast wrote: post #22
account-5 wrote: post #16

I'd love to learn (a) Forth. As a beginner, where do you begin? Like Lisp there seems to be different variants. I always struggle with where to start.

Write one! Forths are so simple that you can write one in minutes if you understand it, and a bit more if you don't know anything about it. Having your own forth is both really gratifying, and gives you an opportunity to play around with the internals and change things up to see what happens (and why the choices made were made). Forth is one of the languages where you have to know the internals to write it, but the i…

Sounds good. Any recommended starter guides? Thanks!

Re: Thinking Forth (1984)

#28

Post by abecedarius »

account-5 wrote: post #16

I'd love to learn (a) Forth. As a beginner, where do you begin? Like Lisp there seems to be different variants. I always struggle with where to start.

See Starting Forth by the same author; it's good and short. It is even older, so it won't help on choosing an implementation and will be affected by a few differences in dialect.

Re: Thinking Forth (1984)

#29

Post by nmz »

account-5 wrote: post #16

I'd love to learn (a) Forth. As a beginner, where do you begin? Like Lisp there seems to be different variants. I always struggle with where to start.

For the forths, pforth is certainly portable, pfe on windows, 8th is ok. ficl is supposed to be for scripting, awhile back (years) measured and it turns out its the fastest one in certain cases.

For the new agey stuff I'd say start with factor if you're on x86. if you're not maybe try retro[0], or write your own.

[0]: http://forthworks.com/retro/

Re: Thinking Forth (1984)

#30

Post by kragen »

DonHopkins wrote: post #19
ninefathom wrote: post #3

My introduction to Forth was tinkering first with Sun SPARC machines in the late 90s and then PowerMacs in the early 00s. At the time, I had no idea that it was a discrete programming language; it only registered in my mind as part of the OpenBoot/OpenFirmware environments. Then I ran into the FreeBSD bootloader and things finally clicked. "Aha," I thought, "this is an actual programming language." But what made it s…

I've frequently written about Mitch Bradley's Forthmacs / Sun Forth / CForth / OpenBoot / OpenFirmware on HN. I was his summer intern at Sun in 1987, and used his Forth systems in many projects! https://github.com/openbios https://wiki.laptop.org/go/FORTH https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29261810 Speaking of Forth experts -- there's Mitch Bradley, who created OpenFirmware: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=218…

Aw, I'm flattered my comments merited a mention
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