3 ms·
The danger of Forth, is that much like with LISP, as soon as a programmer gets competent in it, they think "You know what the world needs? Another version of my
by jhbadger 10y ago
The danger of Forth, is that much like with LISP, as soon as a programmer gets competent in it, they think "You know what the world needs? Another version of my favorite programming language".
- progman 10y agoIsn't this a general attitude? I think it applies to many programming languages, in particular at developers who know only their one favorite language. I learned Forth on a 6502 besides Basic and Assembler, and it was the language with the best performance/memory ratio. It was about 10 times slower than Assembler, and very efficient in memory consumption. Memory was a really big issue at that time. And Forth as a programming language is not bad. You just need a lot of discipline (like at Lisp) because it is so extremely powerful. I wonder why Forth isn't used for firmware since buggy code could be exchanged at runtime.
- jburgess777 10y agoForth has been used for boot firmware: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Firmware https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Firmware
- jhbadger 10y agoTrue, although Forth and Lisp have the advantage of making (at least toy implementations) a project of a few spare evenings due to their simplicity. I was also into Forth in the 1980s on the Apple ][, and have always meant to get back into it (or one of the new Forth-y languages like Factor) one day.