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I’ve been in a “retro computing” deep dive lately and it’s been fascinating to discover Forth. I was surprised that an entirely novel paradigm was hidden despit

I’ve been in a “retro computing” deep dive lately and it’s been fascinating to discover Forth. I was surprised that an entirely novel paradigm was hidden despite much digging over many years. All of the sudden I am seeing it everywhere now too - confirmation bias from growing up skill wise in the age of dot com boom vs right before? I like the feeling of concatenative languages. I especially seem to like the postfix notation over prefix and largely this creates the paradigm of lisp vs forth at first step - in my opinion. I’ve recently dug in to Factor and it’s quite an amazing piece of art that is highly usable and up to date despite such a small community. It almost feels like a secret weapon and too good to be true. I’m having a ton of fun hacking on it. It’s like Smalltalk and forth had a baby. I dream of making an OS with Forth/Factor similar to Plan9 and Oberon. I get a kick out of Forth being made of words and Genesis from the Bible. At first was the Word, and the Word was with Forth, and the Word was Forth. https://factorcode.org/ https://factorcode.org/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oberon_(operating_system) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oberon_(operating_system) Tidbit if anyone cares: I’ve been obsessing over returning to first principles of computing. I’m bored of the internet and browsers. I want to have fun with software AND hardware and Forth seems like such a perfect language to do exactly that with. Factor is a nice grown up example of that but it’s definitely a few steps removed from portability and self bootstrapping behavior like in CollapseOS. Retro Forth is extremely impressive: http://forth.works http://forth.works

nomoreservices 6y ago
Same here. I’ve been down the rabbit hole of Forth and embedded systems for about a month now. I’ve been learning more and more every night since I got started in it, and it has also consumed entire weekends. It’s fascinating. The “hook” for me was seeing things like ifs and loops being written in Forth itself from simpler primitives. I’ve always been a fan of bootstrapping a general purpose computing environment from a small set of primitives, and Forth lets you do exactly that. > I’m bored of the internet and browsers. I want to have fun with software AND hardware I can 100% relate to that feeling. Discovering Forth has been therapeutic for me in a sense. I spend the day dealing with AWS and Java and logs and metrics for large distributed systems, and that brings me zero joy or motivation. I spend my work days looking forward to my time with Forth in the evening. I think it was CollapseOS that sent me down this rabbit hole :)
- AQXt 6y ago
  Here's an interesting article about the downsides of Forth: "My minimal stack of layers is – problem, software, hardware. People working on the problem (algorithms, UI, whatever) can't do software, not really. People doing software can't do hardware, not really. And people doing hardware can't do software, etc. The Forth way of focusing on just the problem you need to solve seems to more or less require that the same person or a very tightly united group focus on all three of these things, and pick the right algorithms, the right computer architecture, the right language, the right word size, etc. (...) So you need at least 3 teams, or people, or hats, that are to an extent ignorant about each other's work. Even if you're doing everything in-house, which, according to Jeff Fox, was essentially a precondition to "doing Forth". So there's another precondtion – having people being able to do what at least 3 people in their respective areas normally do, and concentrating on those 3 things at the same time. Doing the cross-layer global optimization. It's not how I work." https://yosefk.com/blog/my-history-with-forth-stack-machines.html https://yosefk.com/blog/my-history-with-forth-stack-machines...
  - dfischer 6y ago
    I can see that reasoning and these days my opinion there is that if one doesn’t understand the stack end to end then they’re contributing to an ever increasing risk of implosion. That’s largely where we are today in many sectors of society. Experts who only understand the nuances of a niche layer they’ve patched into a series of layers of indirection by the result of not taking the time to fully understand what one is working with from first principles or fundamentals. The OS’s of today are computation stacks that resemble something like bandaids and house of cards with people piling on intricate complexity without conceptual understanding that can be effectively reasoned about. I understand that simple is hard. However when one can reason about a system when it fits entirely in their head then they can extend it completely. I believe all systems should be this way. To have anything else is a risk of corruption or assimilation as the minority control a majority through complexity against time. Sorry I kind of went off on a tangent there. Tl:dr systems should fit in anyone’s ability to reason about it conceptually. Anything too complex is an attack vector and disaster waiting to happen.
pjmlp 6y ago
Note to Oberon, don't focus on version 1 alone. Oberon System 3 with its gadgets framework or the current AOS (still used as teaching tool at ETHZ) also have interesting ideas, and better support for systems programming. The book "The Oberon Companion. A Guide to Using and Programming Oberon System 3" is available as part of the System 3 environment delivered as part of AOS. http://cas.inf.ethz.ch/news/2 http://cas.inf.ethz.ch/news/2 http://builds.cas.inf.ethz.ch/ http://builds.cas.inf.ethz.ch/ You can find some old ISOs from here https://github.com/cubranic/oberon-a2 https://github.com/cubranic/oberon-a2
- dfischer 6y ago
  Thank you. I’m incredibly interested in the UX paradigms demonstrated within Oberon. I’d like to play with that and get some inspiration for a few ideas I’ve been mulling about. Thanks!
  - pjmlp 6y ago
    See my blog article over Oberon, you will find screenshots for AOS. Also have a look at Mesa/Cedar, as it was the inspiration for Oberon ideas. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24450970 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24450970 Comments include a link to one hour demo on YouTube with members of the team. As idea, many of these concepts can be done on modern OSes, on top of something like COM/D-BUS/gRPC/XPC, but none of them go as far as they did.
- alexisread 6y ago
  Another link for A2 documentation is: https://www.research-collection.ethz.ch/bitstream/handle/20.500.11850/147091/eth-26082-02.pdf https://www.research-collection.ethz.ch/bitstream/handle/20.... Also, following on from A2, Composita introduces a component architecture to allow managed memory without GC, and contextless switches: http://concurrency.ch/Content/publications/Blaeser_Component_Operating_System_PLOS_2007.pdf http://concurrency.ch/Content/publications/Blaeser_Component... IMHO better than Rust, and I'd love to see this style of memory management paired with a minimal lisp eg. https://piumarta.com/software/maru/ https://piumarta.com/software/maru/ so we can build more deterministic high-level structures
7thaccount 6y ago
Retro Forth and Factor are both neat. There's a commercial Forth (8th) that has a free hobby license and very affordable professional licenses that I've been playing with lately and having fun. It has a small, yet active community. The language itself is pretty full-featured for a Forth too with a GUI, cross-compilation to native executables on Windows/Mac/Linux/iOS/Android, lots of database access...etc. It is not open source sadly.
colomon 6y ago
I got into Forth in the mid-80s on my Commodore 64. At that point I'd learned C64 Basic and 6502 assembly, and Forth was just a revelation. A much more expressive paradigm than Basic, the full power of bare metal programming, and if using a "high" level language proved too slow it was trivially easy and almost seamless to define performance-critical words in assembly instead. It was a joy to program. (Edited to add that while I haven't done any significant Forth work in probably 20 years, I've long been intrigued by Factor and I keep meaning to try 8th, as I've got some small simple program ideas that would be lovely to be able to run on Mac, iOS, and Android.)
0xdeadbeefbabe 6y ago
Forth is a good example of trade-offs too. In exchange for readability you get impressive bootstrap-ability, and easier writeability IMO.
MisterTea 6y ago
> I dream of making an OS with Forth/Factor similar to Plan9 and Oberon. Oberon inspired Acme and pforth runs on plan 9: https://github.com/Plan9-Archive/pforth9 https://github.com/Plan9-Archive/pforth9 (Factor cant be built on plan 9 due to the lack of c++ feature.) I went through a forth phase and realized that its a good fit within the industrial control and motion segments. I started writing a motion control library I called forthaxis which took coordinates and spat out trajectory commands for servo drives. Didn't get very far but it was a fun exercise.

nomoreservices 6y ago

Same here. I’ve been down the rabbit hole of Forth and embedded systems for about a month now. I’ve been learning more and more every night since I got started in it, and it has also consumed entire weekends. It’s fascinating. The “hook” for me was seeing things like ifs and loops being written in Forth itself from simpler primitives. I’ve always been a fan of bootstrapping a general purpose computing environment from a small set of primitives, and Forth lets you do exactly that. > I’m bored of the internet and browsers. I want to have fun with software AND hardware I can 100% relate to that feeling. Discovering Forth has been therapeutic for me in a sense. I spend the day dealing with AWS and Java and logs and metrics for large distributed systems, and that brings me zero joy or motivation. I spend my work days looking forward to my time with Forth in the evening. I think it was CollapseOS that sent me down this rabbit hole :)

AQXt 6y ago
Here's an interesting article about the downsides of Forth: "My minimal stack of layers is – problem, software, hardware. People working on the problem (algorithms, UI, whatever) can't do software, not really. People doing software can't do hardware, not really. And people doing hardware can't do software, etc. The Forth way of focusing on just the problem you need to solve seems to more or less require that the same person or a very tightly united group focus on all three of these things, and pick the right algorithms, the right computer architecture, the right language, the right word size, etc. (...) So you need at least 3 teams, or people, or hats, that are to an extent ignorant about each other's work. Even if you're doing everything in-house, which, according to Jeff Fox, was essentially a precondition to "doing Forth". So there's another precondtion – having people being able to do what at least 3 people in their respective areas normally do, and concentrating on those 3 things at the same time. Doing the cross-layer global optimization. It's not how I work." https://yosefk.com/blog/my-history-with-forth-stack-machines.html https://yosefk.com/blog/my-history-with-forth-stack-machines...
- dfischer 6y ago
  I can see that reasoning and these days my opinion there is that if one doesn’t understand the stack end to end then they’re contributing to an ever increasing risk of implosion. That’s largely where we are today in many sectors of society. Experts who only understand the nuances of a niche layer they’ve patched into a series of layers of indirection by the result of not taking the time to fully understand what one is working with from first principles or fundamentals. The OS’s of today are computation stacks that resemble something like bandaids and house of cards with people piling on intricate complexity without conceptual understanding that can be effectively reasoned about. I understand that simple is hard. However when one can reason about a system when it fits entirely in their head then they can extend it completely. I believe all systems should be this way. To have anything else is a risk of corruption or assimilation as the minority control a majority through complexity against time. Sorry I kind of went off on a tangent there. Tl:dr systems should fit in anyone’s ability to reason about it conceptually. Anything too complex is an attack vector and disaster waiting to happen.

pjmlp 6y ago

Note to Oberon, don't focus on version 1 alone. Oberon System 3 with its gadgets framework or the current AOS (still used as teaching tool at ETHZ) also have interesting ideas, and better support for systems programming. The book "The Oberon Companion. A Guide to Using and Programming Oberon System 3" is available as part of the System 3 environment delivered as part of AOS. http://cas.inf.ethz.ch/news/2 http://cas.inf.ethz.ch/news/2 http://builds.cas.inf.ethz.ch/ http://builds.cas.inf.ethz.ch/ You can find some old ISOs from here https://github.com/cubranic/oberon-a2 https://github.com/cubranic/oberon-a2

dfischer 6y ago
Thank you. I’m incredibly interested in the UX paradigms demonstrated within Oberon. I’d like to play with that and get some inspiration for a few ideas I’ve been mulling about. Thanks!
- pjmlp 6y ago
  See my blog article over Oberon, you will find screenshots for AOS. Also have a look at Mesa/Cedar, as it was the inspiration for Oberon ideas. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24450970 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24450970 Comments include a link to one hour demo on YouTube with members of the team. As idea, many of these concepts can be done on modern OSes, on top of something like COM/D-BUS/gRPC/XPC, but none of them go as far as they did.
alexisread 6y ago
Another link for A2 documentation is: https://www.research-collection.ethz.ch/bitstream/handle/20.500.11850/147091/eth-26082-02.pdf https://www.research-collection.ethz.ch/bitstream/handle/20.... Also, following on from A2, Composita introduces a component architecture to allow managed memory without GC, and contextless switches: http://concurrency.ch/Content/publications/Blaeser_Component_Operating_System_PLOS_2007.pdf http://concurrency.ch/Content/publications/Blaeser_Component... IMHO better than Rust, and I'd love to see this style of memory management paired with a minimal lisp eg. https://piumarta.com/software/maru/ https://piumarta.com/software/maru/ so we can build more deterministic high-level structures

7thaccount 6y ago

Retro Forth and Factor are both neat. There's a commercial Forth (8th) that has a free hobby license and very affordable professional licenses that I've been playing with lately and having fun. It has a small, yet active community. The language itself is pretty full-featured for a Forth too with a GUI, cross-compilation to native executables on Windows/Mac/Linux/iOS/Android, lots of database access...etc. It is not open source sadly.

colomon 6y ago

I got into Forth in the mid-80s on my Commodore 64. At that point I'd learned C64 Basic and 6502 assembly, and Forth was just a revelation. A much more expressive paradigm than Basic, the full power of bare metal programming, and if using a "high" level language proved too slow it was trivially easy and almost seamless to define performance-critical words in assembly instead. It was a joy to program. (Edited to add that while I haven't done any significant Forth work in probably 20 years, I've long been intrigued by Factor and I keep meaning to try 8th, as I've got some small simple program ideas that would be lovely to be able to run on Mac, iOS, and Android.)

0xdeadbeefbabe 6y ago

Forth is a good example of trade-offs too. In exchange for readability you get impressive bootstrap-ability, and easier writeability IMO.

MisterTea 6y ago

> I dream of making an OS with Forth/Factor similar to Plan9 and Oberon. Oberon inspired Acme and pforth runs on plan 9: https://github.com/Plan9-Archive/pforth9 https://github.com/Plan9-Archive/pforth9 (Factor cant be built on plan 9 due to the lack of c++ feature.) I went through a forth phase and realized that its a good fit within the industrial control and motion segments. I started writing a motion control library I called forthaxis which took coordinates and spat out trajectory commands for servo drives. Didn't get very far but it was a fun exercise.