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Comment by adg001 | Hacker News Reader

> Okay. But Fredric Jameson establishes that in postmodernism we have experienced a weakening sense of historisity such that what is, what was, and what will be all exist as presents in time. 1970, 1991, 1992, and 2017 all happen simultaneously.

Okay with the postmodernism, but relying on a memory unsafe language to implement a server-side web framework in 1970, 1991, 1992, and 2017 is equally anachronistic. That being said much love to Forth! – Or, as the post-modern philosopher Slavoj Žižek is used to say: "and so on and so Forth".

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Maybe a nitpick, but

> memory unsafe language

That's the implementation thing, not the language. You can implement an ANSI Forth standard like GForth in a memory safe way without a lot of issues. Even the memory allocation words[0] are easily implemented in a garbage collected language. Of course that makes it useless for embedded purposes which is where Forth usually works well, but that's not an issue as you are not doing that here.

[0] https://forth-standard.org/standard/memory

Half correct. It's true that you can improve the safety that way, but what proponents of memory safety consider a no-go is pointer arithmetic and crafting - basically not what C allows.

You can forbid yourself to do these things and implement a "safety layer" for string handling, array handling with bound checking etc. but at the end of the day, it's more a a cultural thing than a technical thing. IMO this era wants to build reliability from lots of unreliable parts, and that include developers; cowboy programmers who could make reliable things by themselves have been retired.

Well, you see the result: smartphones that can't make emergency calls when you need it etc. But hey, it's written in a memory safe language and our bus factor is 0.00004 !

You can do fake pointer arithmetic which won't hurt this use case (server-side web framework); if you implement Gforth as an interpreter on the JVM/CLR or running it with Emscripten, there is no issue for server-side web frameworks like this while being safe.

That's been done for C a few times (this [0] and there are a few others); if you don't depend on the actual physical memory addresses you are using (which, in embedded, you often are counting on, but not in a server-side framework).

> it's more a a cultural thing than a technical thing.

I agree with that

> IMO this era wants to build reliability from lots of unreliable parts, and that include developers; cowboy programmers who could make reliable things by themselves have been retired.

Not sure what this means?

[0] https://chrisseaton.com/plas15/safec.pdf

Absolutely, the same can be said about C – And how many succeeded in doing so in the latest 30 years of Web history?

I am reminded about a quote attributed to Keith Martin (mathematician): "Theory is important, at least in theory"

w3m comes to mind

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