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Lots of people, myself included, implement a Forth without really using it. That makes it sound like a toy, but it's more like an important lesson in programmin
by jungler 8y ago
Lots of people, myself included, implement a Forth without really using it. That makes it sound like a toy, but it's more like an important lesson in programming concisely and choosing a comfortable level of abstraction for the problem. Forth is designed to be simple to implement and extend, and that's the foundation of Forth as a whole philosophy: choosing a specification that actually solves the problem without generalizing or over-architecting the solution. Forth, the language, is just the set of tradeoffs that Moore thought was best suited to that, a position that most of the industry implicitly disagrees with(because they do things like introduce large libraries and dependencies where Moore is very DIY). It's a very concise language with a lot of sharp edges.
Look up "Thinking Forth" for more in this vein.
- madhadron 8y agoI second the vote for "Thinking Forth." It's free online[1] now. Most of agile development, refactoring, YAGNI, all the buzzwords and advice on programming from the 1990's and 2000's are already there, distilled down into nice examples. [1]: http://thinking-forth.sourceforge.net/ http://thinking-forth.sourceforge.net/
- qznc 8y ago> choosing a specification that actually solves the problem without generalizing or over-architecting the solution I would not call it over-architecting, if you sacrifice portability, maintainability, *-ility too much. What exactly is "too much" depends of course.
- abecedarius 8y agoWe had another comment thread on things you can learn from it, a couple years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14852625 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14852625 It is unlikely to come up in practical use now, admittedly.