It seems that as interesting as Forth is, the community of such languages is very niche and small, even smaller than Lisp. Can anyone speak to recent changes in velocity or energy?
One of the most impressive languages you've never heard about.
The ideal system is optimized for its problem domain. That means not only adding needed functionality, but also dropping unneeded functionality, and tweaking functionality to better fit the problem at hand. That’s not surprising for a system that shines when running with very little memory.
That’s different from, say C++. Nobody says clang, gcc and Visual C++ are “a C++”.
If they were philosophically similar to Forths and Lisps, those writing programs in them would be happy to change int promotion rules, operator precedence, vtable layout, etc, and different compilers would make different choices there.
I have been considering doing an Ask HN to see what people felt should be included on an initial ‘release’ or showing of a language. Maybe I should.
Feel more Forth has no syntax - just space separated words defined either in assembly or other forth words
Forth is both easy to implement and yields very compact binaries, so it has been favored as the first environment implemented on new hardware, and as the controller for satellites. This has become less important as resource constraints ease.
Forth's progeny PostScript continues unabated. Humans tend not to code directly in PDF format, as that is grave-digging. The "specification" has many geological layers (the earliest are easiest to code in) and no verification or even machine-readable definition, so one is at the mercy of testing PDF files with multiple applications. All the problems associated with Markdown, only on steroids. But one can easily write code that generates valid PostScript, and have the results translated to PDF.
The first time I used 32 bit ints on an 8 bit computer was in a FORTH that implemented 32 bit math, for instance.
Oddly, within a few years people had shoehorned GUIs into much smaller machines, such as
They very issue where Byte shows the Macintosh had a lot of computer ads with PC's starting at 128K and being expandable to 512K or 640K. The Macintosh was under specified in memory compared to non-GUI PCs of its era.
Lisp is top down, forth is bottom up.