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Comment by protomyth | Hacker News Reader

Forth was always fun for me because it really was fun to build up a dictionary of words that solved your problem. It practically forced coming at the problem from the bottom. I do admit that I liked some aspects of Postscript better than Forth, but both are experiences.

Thinking Forth is a pretty good starting point and in general a great programming book http://thinking-forth.sourceforge.net/

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It's called factoring with subroutines, and Forth hasn't cornered the market on anything by calling them words.

No, but Forth provided one of the nicest, most immediate, and interactive environments to explore a problem. Instead of multiple files in a text editor, you build and test your app live and then dump it all to a text file. I have rarely had that experience with any other language except Smalltalk. I understand some Lisp environments act that way, but Forth was available places Lisp and Smalltalk were not.

>you build and test your app live and then dump it all to a text file

The Tcl shell is really great for doing this. Since everything can be represented as a string-type, you're able to introspect your defined procedures and dump them to disk.

Developing on the target is just so last century. Now that programmers have developed the IDE you'll have to pull them from their cold dead hands.

I don't think I've used any IDE (other than Smalltalk) that was vaguely in the class of using Forth for interactivity and building of programs from the bottom up.

Whats up with mocking everyone you reply to on this thread?

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