I don't get it. Who's using this, and for what?
I find it both easier to implement than C and easier to develop in than C, while being nearly as fast as C, and often lower footprint than C. It's a really good language for "I really don't want to write in assembly, but there are no decent HLLs already implemented for my target"
It basically lets you string together a bunch of primitives and user defined functions using a stack. It is probably the only system that is useful where a single person can understand the entire language and implementation. You have to build everything yourself though.
I always wondered how Sun and Apple addressed this, as they used forth in the form of OpenBootPROM as a boot environment on various platforms. Very, very nice.
On the (much) lower end was the Jupiter Ace (https://jupiter-ace.com/jupiterace/). The Ace is a fun what-might-have-been where Forth beat BASIC for the '80s PC soul. There were commercial Forths for other PCs of the time (Apple II, Atari 800, TI99), but I guess because they were extra cost, they didn't become that popular.
in academia. Not outside.
In fact, I don’t think I’ve ever seen a .ps file that wasn’t hosted on a .edu domain (or other countries’ equivalents.)
Similarly, PostScript was the control language for high-end printers back in the day, so it was used extensively as the final output format for print, even if it was rarely saved off as a .ps file.
> in academia. Not outside.
NeXTSTEP utilized "Display PostScript"[0] for both printing and display. Apple's Cocoa can trace direct ancestry to frameworks originating in NeXTSTEP[1]. I am pretty sure this included use of PostScript in the display/printing frameworks as well, but do not have references to support that memory.
So, while '.ps' files are not often seen in the wild, as you say, a strong case can be made that PostScript was once (if not currently) widely used.
0 - https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/learning-cocoa-with/059...
1 - https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2012/12/the-legacy-of-next-l...
I would argue that’s not widely used.
Apple's Cocoa can trace direct ancestry to frameworks originating in NeXTSTEP
Not sure ancestry counts.
printing
Ah, fair point, thanks. I had forgotten about that.
My original claim is incorrect.
I needed to do batches of mathematical and optical analysis of novel materials synthesized in their labs. This demanded conditional logic, statistical analysis, layout, rasterizing, and archival of results. A single PostScript file did all of the above, with handwritten and template-generated code that ran on the output device, typically a printer. Weird choice of language, maybe; I was a lone computing nerd in a lab of mad chemists. But for rapid prototyping and always having presentable results as the analysis evolved, PostScript ended up being really easy to use.
Looking back 30 years now, I think it was also impressive that it was device independent, readable and commented code, with numeric data embedded like a heredoc. I haven't seen those docs or PostScript code for decades but it wouldn't surprise me if they ran on a PostScript device or viewer today.
Anyways, commercial use of PostScript happened, if mostly internally. At that workplace it was a known and reasonable document format to distribute.