Hacker News Reader

Comment by andreasgonewild | Hacker News Reader

Using Forth as a substrate lets you focus on the more interesting aspects to an even higher degree than Lisp. The last thing you want is detailed instructions; unless you're just building another whatever, which never really made sense to me. Build the most simple and naive thing possible that works the way you want it to, and go from there. That's how Snabel was born:

https://github.com/andreas-gone-wild/snackis/blob/master/sna...

View on HN

Therein lies my problem with Forth. Yes there is a ton of power, but that is inaccessible to a lot of users. I know I can look at Jones Forth & MeCrisp, but I honestly couldn't see where to start. I'd like to see a tutorial start with either an assembly or C base and then teach Forth fundamentals such as how to start your dictionary and choose between direct/indirect threading and how to implement each. I'm always curious how so many Forth users got to that stage.

Edit: It looks like Snabel is a Forth inspired concatenative language written in C++ with some perl like features. That's pretty cool. If you ever get the chance I think I'd enjoy it if you made some video tutorials explaining the design and some of the code choices.

I believe the gforth manual contains a fair bit about its implementation and design decisions.

For threading, this is probably a good start: https://www.complang.tuwien.ac.at/forth/gforth/Docs-html/Thr...

EDIT: I don't know how well you know Forth, but it's probably a waste of time trying to implement it before you grok it from userland, if that's where you are. Understanding first the concatenative paradigm and then (more importantly) the deep metaprogramming runtime-is-a-fundamental-part-of-your-application paradigm (which Forth shares with Lisp and Smalltalk) is super important

I understand a bit of userland, but not a whole lot. I figured you needed to learn Forth via a bit of both as all things tend to get circular, as in I'd understand this better if I knew how it was implemented.

I came into Forth with 32 years of mixed experience from Lisp, Smalltalk, Haskell, C++, C, Java, Perl, Python, Clojure, Scala and more; it's difficult for me to judge anything from that perspective.

I've never written a standard Forth program in my life though, never installed any other implementation. The second I was introduced to Forth, it clicked; Lisp took me much, much longer to get by comparison.

Like I said, I'm not very much into rebuilding what has already been built better by someone else. Anyone who's written any amount of code is bound to have own ideas, and the nice thing about Forth as a substrate is that doesn't come with that many ideas of its own.

I've written a few blog posts explaining design choices (https://github.com/andreas-gone-wild/blog/blob/master/forthy...), there's more interesting stuff to come now that the pieces are falling into place; I've only been working on Snabel for a couple of months.

Thanks for the reply. I'll take a look. When you said it clicked. What we're you looking at? Starting or Thinking Forth or what? I'm trying to find out how most people learn to build their own system.

It was a random blog post praising the simplicity of Forth; couldn't find it again if my life depended on it. Thankfully it didn't go too much into Forth dogmatics; what it did instead was to cut the ideas down to their core, which simplified my thought process to the point where I could finally see a clear path to something that felt like it was worth my effort.

We over-complicate things, for different reasons. The truth is that nothing is very complicated once you understand it well enough to break it down to its core.

How often do you use Forth for your professional /non hobby work?

Check out Moving Forth: http://www.bradrodriguez.com/papers/moving1.htm

Reply on news.ycombinator.com