I think it's a yearning of simplicity. Software engineering today is complex, slow, and extremely removed from the machine. Forth is one of the simplest environments you can build that allows you to build complex software.

I've wondered the same. It feels to me like we as a software writing community are yearning for a new paradigm or challenge.

Often time this expresses itself as a framework du'jour. But recently it seems like people are reaching back to languages of yore to see if there is some piece of mystic art to be applied to today's problems.

I'll admit I'm guilty of this outlook. I would love to write code professionally in Forth, APL, or any number of 'long gone' languages.

I fell into that rabbit hole thanks to the quarantine. I've been find it therapeutic: the simplicity of it is unbeatable. It gives me the same sense of speaking directly to the machine that assembly does, but at a higher level. I've also grown to love RPN.

I posted my project here just the other day: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24604457 I had an absolute blast working on it, and I'm looking forward to my next Forth-related project (still deciding on what it's going to be).

The reason might be that there is nothing new to invent or explore so they wallow endlessly in old dried-up shit. Forth is particularly useless, because it only truly made sense in fixed-width computers, where one word was equal one symbol and list of symbols was on separate paper tape. It was so sweet compared to Fortran that I still have cavities in my brain.