Hacker News Reader

Comment by kryptiskt | Hacker News Reader

At least two good games were written in Forth in the 80's, Starflight and its sequel. So I have paid real money for Forth-based products.

View on HN

Speaking of games and forth, the Jupiter Ace is a pretty interesting example: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jupiter_Ace

In a time where basic was alpha and omega in consumer micros, a british company decided to ship their cheap micro with a forth implementation. Needless to say it wasn't very successful, but I wish I had one.

I'd been curious about this one since it was released in the early 80's. I wrote an emulation in python to satisfy my curiosity. (https://github.com/deadsy/py_z80) My general conclusion was that the hardware wasn't good enough (monochrome competing with the ZX Spectrum's color) and that Forth didn't offer enough advantages over BASIC to warrant significant usage. It's an interesting design though, and it's good to see how they built their Forth system in an 8K ROM.

I actually came across your project the other week, looking for a python Z80 emulator. Commendable work, though I have yet to try it, since you had already covered my intended use of it by making an Ace emulator.

I read some interview with the guys that designed the machine, and their stubbornness in not going for color video and pushing for forth kind of mirrors some of the sentiments about forth programmers shared here. They were definitely primarily engineers with little regard for the benefits of being conventional, which I can appreciate.

And quite a few failures. Another one that I just remembered: The first Atari pinball machine, 4 X 4, was attempted in FORTH. They gave it up and re-wrote it in assembly.

The Atari coin-op group had an internal version of FORTH that was actually pretty whizzy; one or two guys spent a fair amount of time on it. But no games actually shipped that used it.

Sure, but there are lots of failures in pretty much every language, right?

FORTh seems to have MUCH more than its share of failures. Also, zealots, who are (in my experience) unreasoning and deaf to counter-arguments. FORTH also does not seem to scale to large projects very well (I'm guessing that the number of large, long-lived projects in FORTH is very, very small compared to contemporary languages like Pascal and C).

There's always been a persistent rumor that some of the vector-based Atari coin-op games like Battlezone were written in FORTH, but I've never been able to definitively confirm or refute that. (I can find messages out on the net from the mid-90s with people talking about this, but no actual replies from people who would know.) I always liked the idea, although I don't think I really like FORTH that much.

(Those who remember MUCKs like TinyMUCK might have actually used a FORTH variant: MUF. I actually wrote a couple of MUF programs, although by that point the language supported lists and dictionaries so it wasn't quite so headbangingly tough for those of us who do not have stack-based brains.)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com