Some Thoughts on Forth Vis-A-vis Oracle and Java SE

sam-falvo.github.io

45 points·falava··5 comments

Circa 1983 I got hold of the paper FIG-Forth via snail mail. (Modems? none in my house those days.) I got a version going on my housemate's Apple ][+, which wasn't too hard as I'd learned 6502 assembly/machine language, and I understood the Apple's peripherals reasonably well.

I hacked together a boot disk which booted and presented the Forth REPL. One of my first projects was a text editor.

I probably still love Forth, and later on I sort of used the knowledge to learn PostScript. I went on to do a lot of work in PostScript and I definitely love that. And miss them both.

One of the reasons why Forth has suffered in the greater computing community is, “If you’ve seen one Forth, you’ve seen one Forth.”

I love Forth. One of the first things I do on any new machine is apt-get or yum it. But I have never managed to write an actually useful program in it. It just isn't well-suited to the use cases of the vast majority of programmers. And I say that as a guy who has shoehorned OCaml, Haskell and Elisp into "real work"...

Previously posted

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13208494

and

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13229563

True, but those didn't get much attention, so a small number of reposts are ok: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html.

tldr; I hate cats, so let me tell you why i like flowers so much.

What has the whole Oracle/Java hate have to do with this article? Pointless, and distracting.

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