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Comment by caslon | Hacker News Reader

It's hard to claim FORTH is "hype" while not being delusional about how few people actually have used it (and how high the percentage of very accomplished FORTH authors there are out of the whole of FORTH users). There is exceedingly little "hype" about FORTH, because the number of people who genuinely are aware of anything about it as simple as "FORTH is a postfix, stack-based language" is probably under 2000 worldwide, especially given most of its users happen to be dead now.

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.

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There is a commercial forth called 8th that has a few thousand users and has support for ODBC, a few native databases, Bluetooth, can run on iOS, Android, Mac, Linux, Windows, has a GUI, can cross-compile to different systems, matrices, constraint solver, I/O for a lot of common formats...etc. It's a cool language that has the same abstraction as Python, but can go lower as well.

> There is a commercial forth called 8th

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.

I think it's more than superficial. Word definitions are done the same and you concatevatively build up your DSL in the same manner. Nothing keeps any other Forth from having a GC, it's just that many are thin layers over the hardware and are used in applications where a GC is unnecessary.

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.

PostScript also has dup, rot and pick, though the last two are given different names, and it's stack-based. PostScript is a derivative of FORTH, but it isn't FORTH. While a FORTH can be object-oriented (more than a few have been), have any which way of memory management and so forth, it might be more generous to describe 8th as its own descendant thing to stop Moore from rolling in his... bed. He's still alive; we aren't saying grave yet.

8th does sort of get rid of the ethos of FORTH, which is a pretty important part of a language.

I would totally agree it runs somewhat counter to Moore's ideas of insanely low fat computing, but Moore isn't the sole viewpoint on Forth (big as he is and with being the creator and a freaking genius). How big are other Forth's like GForth? It's still a Forth right? I just think you're being over specific, but to each their own.

Gforth is a fairly large Forth but it is still a Forth in the sense that cells can hold untyped machine addresses, etc. You can write realtime applications in Forth (deterministic execution paths, no gc delays etc), it has its own weird metaprogramming model, etc. I don't think 8th is anything like that. I haven't used 8th though.

Sure, and JS has "for", "while", etc. The issue is the mindset during use, which is completely different between Forth and 8th. You could also look at Oforth, which is like 8th despite having Forth in its name, and which is free (oforth.com).

Is oforth still being developed?

Forth is not under the radar in any sense. It is much more popular and well known than any underground band.

It's pretty under the radar. Your perception is probably being influenced by your online forum of choice. HN has around a dozen members who frequently post FORTH-related content, and a moderator that has sympathy for the language and frequently offers second-chances to posts about it.

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.

If I see it frequently on HN (possibly the most popular tech forum in the world??) and also /r/programming, then it is NOT underground.

HN is absolutely not the most popular tech forum in the world (most stories struggle to get half a thousand votes, and the actual rate of access for HN is so low that dang is alarmed when he sees more than sixty logged-in queries a second[0]), and reddit just reposts what's on HN.

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.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26473226

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