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Comment by kick | Hacker News Reader

That's not true at all. I know multiple people who are incredibly productive in Forth environments, though I don't use it myself. Pretending that it's like writing in JVM bytecode (despite some overlap between the two) is completely unfounded.

Your claim that C# and Java won based on merits is similarly unfounded: they won because they have major corporate backing. There are countless languages before and after that did what they did, better. Limbo beats Java at almost everything Java aims to do, for example.

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I've met a couple of really good FORTH programmers over the years. They were humble about it, were also happy to use other tools in their work, and they just happened to be working on projects that were really good fits for FORTH's strengths.

I've met a lot more FORTH fanatics, people for whom FORTH was the answer no matter the problem; people who just would not shut up about how superior and fantastic it was, and have you seen the light, brother? Okay, most of them weren't that bad, but a few were (one guy I worked with got fired because (a) he told his boss that FORTH was all he was going to use, (b) the FORTH runtime was over half of his code budget and he had kinda been keeping that secret, and (c) none of that fantastically <insert some adjectives here> FORTH code was compatible with the ROM it needed to run on . . . so you can imagine that fun little tete a tete).

Whatever the languages's wins or faults, it's still a great idea to write your own FORTH at some point. It's a ton of fun, and quite instructive when you've gotten a fully functional programming environment that fits in a few tens of kilobytes.

> I've met a lot more FORTH fanatics, people for whom FORTH was the answer no matter the problem; people who just would not shut up about how superior and fantastic it was, and have you seen the light, brother?

I've seen exactly one Forth programmer like that, they are simply too rare. But the stereotype language fanatic is easily recognized in other language eco-systems, Perl and Rust have a disproportionately high share of this and I'm sure there are others. Typically this stems from either insecurity or a lack of exposure to other eco-systems or the drive to create camps of in and out groups to attempt to gain mindshare.

Very tiring and counterproductive in the long run, I think to some extent this is what killed Perl, simply that no matter how good the language was/is regular people simply don't want to be associated with fanatics and recognize that no tool will ever be perfect.

I think some of it may come from being forced to use X language, and then finding Y language, and realizing that it fits your mindset perfectly, and deciding that everyone using X must be idiots. Ie, these partisans were exposed to other languages, but never particularly liked them, until this new thing came along that seemed like a revelation. The zeal of a convert, sort of thing.

I haven't spent enough time with Forth or Rust to say, but I can see why both of them could seem like that to people. Forth, especially, has a sort of philosophical/hacker bent that is inherently appealing to a certain kind of person (including me!). Whereas I can't imagine Java ever winning someone over like that (though I'm sure it has).

I don't think it is major corporate backing -- for example, neither Perl nor PHP had one, and they still are (and always were) vastly more popular than Forth.

It seems to me that Forth only works for certain people, and those people are quite rare. For the majority of programmers, almost every other language will make them much more productive.

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