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Comment by kabdib | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.)

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).

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