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Forth is the language that taught me (among other things) that its possible to break problems into pieces that are too small to understand the whole. I'm not s
by StillBored 8y ago
Forth is the language that taught me (among other things) that its possible to break problems into pieces that are too small to understand the whole.
I'm not sure really what to call this other than something along the lines of can't see the forest for the trees. Its the opposite of having functions so large it takes hours to figure out what they do. In this case you have words that you can't figure out what they do for days because the call graphs step across 300 different modules and 10k other words all of which are like "update-pie-with-apples" and comprise two other words "dup pie, apple-pie-update" or something.
- todd8 8y agoMy experience with FORTH was similar, although you've put into words the problems I found with FORTH better than I could. The original article is by Leo Brodie. I bought his book Starting FORTH (which is now available online[1]) shortly after reading a 1980 Byte Magazine article on FORTH. It's not hard to implement FORTH. I found that R. G. Loeliger's book[2] Threaded Interpretive Languages: Their Design and Implementation allowed me to easily build my own FORTH inspired system. [1] https://www.forth.com/starting-forth/ https://www.forth.com/starting-forth/ [2] https://www.amazon.com/Threaded-Interpretive-Languages-Design-Implementation/dp/007038360X https://www.amazon.com/Threaded-Interpretive-Languages-Desig...
- stefano 8y agoThat problem seems common in Smalltalk too. It's best described by this Adele Goldberg's quote: "In Smalltalk, everything happens somewhere else."