To extend the hype metaphor in your comment, FORTH is like the really good, really under-the-radar niche local artist that a bunch of critically-acclaimed, really hyped bands like.
8th resembles Forth about as much as Javascript resembles C. There is a superficial similarity but 8th underneath is dynamically typed, garbage collected, etc, while Forth is close to assembler. That said, 8th is cool.
In general, I kinda get what you're saying though in that JS and C share a syntax and are very different. However, 8th still is stack based and has all the hallmark Forth words like "dup", "rot", "pick"... etc that clearly mark it as part of that language family.
8th does sort of get rid of the ethos of FORTH, which is a pretty important part of a language.
I can definitely think of underground bands more popular than it and significantly more well known than it despite still being absolutely under the radar, because it only has, upper bound, ten thousand people who actually program in it. That's basically a single college radio station play's worth.
You're conflating "I read this" with "The world reads this." This is a common error. The trick is to realize that your experience with the internet is not universal, and that it is unlikely you are the average user in any group you're in.
Further, it doesn't even show up on the subreddit you mention very often; I just checked the reddit BigQuery database and FORTH posts don't collect a portion of upvotes worth mentioning in any given year.
Also: Using superfluous question marks for emphasis is a reddit habit. It should not be done on HN, because it is annoying and lowers the quality of discussion; the guidelines forbid uppercase-emphasis for this reason, and this is more egregious.
- a vt100 terminal emulator
- a pacman clone
- a text editor
- a plotting utility for an HP plotter
- an interface for a Coulter counter
Probably other stuff I have forgotten now.
As someone that spent a couple of years dabbling in forth before moving on to Ruby, I became a lot more appreciative of the sheer readability of Ruby, and ruby-inspired languages like coffeescript & elixir.
However I still have a soft spot for the ethos of Chuck Moore. Abstractions are something that we should be wary of as programmers.
I feel lisp is very similar, an inverted sort of forth, I've never tried lisp but it seems to be a much easier language to work with than forth.
Not in my experience.
I even recycled "throw-away" scripts - thing that were written as "write-only" - a couple of times. I also continuously improve my dialect, so sometimes I break the utilities I've made for work. One of them has been working 24/7 for years (probably longer than your time playing with Forth), during which I have modified it to better fit my evolving needs more than a couple of times.
FORTH was invented in 1968, and was first used outside of Moore's lab by 1970. I could only wish one of my works was still being trash-talked on HN 53 years from now! You can't pay for that kind of "hype".
What influence has Forth had?
also I don't know if it's still the case but mac used openfirmware fcode/forth