51–60 of 138 posts
I believe that any programmer should at least know a little about Forth. It's like Lisp. Just knowing about them is extremely enlightening, even if you don't use them in your daily life. Obligatory link: https://github.com/nornagon/jonesforth/blob/master/jonesfort... This well-written tutorial will have you implement a Forth in 500 lines of assembly and another 500 lines of Forth. You will feel like a different perso…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Agree with the parent, it's a language worth knowing like LISP is worth knowing, but (unlike LISP) it is not a good language choice for almost all use cases in 2023 (almost all use cases are not that memory constrained any more, even embedded systems), for the same reason you shouldn't use Perl (it is very hard to read code). I was going to say "its main disadvantage is that the only way to find out what a piece of c…
> for the same reason you shouldn't use Perl (it is very hard to read code) I slightly disagree with this take on Perl. Agreed that it is easy to write code which is hard for others to read, and agreed that it is often not a good idea in a large-team setting, for that reason. But there is a lot of code that doesn't fall in that category, and Perl, by its nature (and by CPAN), can be remarkably good at just "getting s…
> A single person should be able to understand a computing system in its entirety, so that they can change it to fit their needs This idea combined with the notion that software written by someone else necessarily serves their purposes rather than yours has me gradually working in that direction. Really all I need to do is write (or run) a forth on some bare metal. It's fun to build your own hardware as well which is…
I believe that any programmer should at least know a little about Forth. It's like Lisp. Just knowing about them is extremely enlightening, even if you don't use them in your daily life. Obligatory link: https://github.com/nornagon/jonesforth/blob/master/jonesfort... This well-written tutorial will have you implement a Forth in 500 lines of assembly and another 500 lines of Forth. You will feel like a different perso…
[deleted]
I didn't even see a mention of the old bumper sticker: "Forth love if honk then"
> A system does not have to be complex to be flexible, extensible, and customizable An important lesson that many teams and orgs still haven't internalized. Maybe one day it'll be more commonly understood.
The author complains about not having local variables, but most decent Forth environments have them. It is not difficult to have local variables in Forth, just use a library or compiler that provides them.
It's an interesting decision to write an article like this without actually showing any Forth code. I think I like it? Either way, I am compelled to build a Forth interpreter this weekend. Sounds rad as hell!
Loved the article. I played around a but with Forth in the mid 80’s and my experience was very similar to the authors, eg astonishment that one could have a language/computing environment that was simple enough to understand in its entirety yet trivially extensible. Forth also makes complexity ridiculously hard, so you end up breaking down complex problems into simpler ones. I never tried to build my own Forth, thoug…