5 ms·

Why people are speaking a lot about Forth this year? Nothing against (I love Forth), just curious.

andrewnc 6y ago
I've wondered the same. It feels to me like we as a software writing community are yearning for a new paradigm or challenge. Often time this expresses itself as a framework du'jour. But recently it seems like people are reaching back to languages of yore to see if there is some piece of mystic art to be applied to today's problems. I'll admit I'm guilty of this outlook. I would love to write code professionally in Forth, APL, or any number of 'long gone' languages.
- Impossible 6y ago
  I was doing some programming language work last year for Facebook Horizon, and while not appropriate for that product it really made me interested in building a visual Forth or APL for programming in VR, mostly because the high amount of expressiveness with minimal symbols.
  - andrewnc 6y ago
    I would use it if you ever built it :) that sounds fascinating.
juancn 6y ago
I think it's a yearning of simplicity. Software engineering today is complex, slow, and extremely removed from the machine. Forth is one of the simplest environments you can build that allows you to build complex software.
cblum 6y ago
I fell into that rabbit hole thanks to the quarantine. I've been find it therapeutic: the simplicity of it is unbeatable. It gives me the same sense of speaking directly to the machine that assembly does, but at a higher level. I've also grown to love RPN. I posted my project here just the other day: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24604457 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24604457 I had an absolute blast working on it, and I'm looking forward to my next Forth-related project (still deciding on what it's going to be).
- mikewarot 6y ago
  Forth seems to be a write only language, I'm not sure if it's the reverse polish stack oriented structure, or the lack of modern things we're used to like arrays, procedure calls, etc... STOICAL seems to address all of these, but it's written in dense C code that I can't make heads nor tails of... but the ideas are really, really attractive. http://stoical.sourceforge.net/documentation.php http://stoical.sourceforge.net/documentation.php The stand out features for me 'string puts a string on the stack (along with a type flag for string 'cube : dup dup * * ; is how you would define cube, which is a bit different, but not a huge shift He's got ways to do types, dictionaries, arrays that also look like stacks... all sorts of magic including networking! How much of it could be crammed into something that boots inside of a VM?
timonoko 6y ago
The reason might be that there is nothing new to invent or explore so they wallow endlessly in old dried-up shit. Forth is particularly useless, because it only truly made sense in fixed-width computers, where one word was equal one symbol and list of symbols was on separate paper tape. It was so sweet compared to Fortran that I still have cavities in my brain.

I've wondered the same. It feels to me like we as a software writing community are yearning for a new paradigm or challenge. Often time this expresses itself as a framework du'jour. But recently it seems like people are reaching back to languages of yore to see if there is some piece of mystic art to be applied to today's problems. I'll admit I'm guilty of this outlook. I would love to write code professionally in Forth, APL, or any number of 'long gone' languages.

Impossible 6y ago
I was doing some programming language work last year for Facebook Horizon, and while not appropriate for that product it really made me interested in building a visual Forth or APL for programming in VR, mostly because the high amount of expressiveness with minimal symbols.
- andrewnc 6y ago
  I would use it if you ever built it :) that sounds fascinating.

juancn 6y ago

I think it's a yearning of simplicity. Software engineering today is complex, slow, and extremely removed from the machine. Forth is one of the simplest environments you can build that allows you to build complex software.

cblum 6y ago

I fell into that rabbit hole thanks to the quarantine. I've been find it therapeutic: the simplicity of it is unbeatable. It gives me the same sense of speaking directly to the machine that assembly does, but at a higher level. I've also grown to love RPN. I posted my project here just the other day: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24604457 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24604457 I had an absolute blast working on it, and I'm looking forward to my next Forth-related project (still deciding on what it's going to be).

mikewarot 6y ago
Forth seems to be a write only language, I'm not sure if it's the reverse polish stack oriented structure, or the lack of modern things we're used to like arrays, procedure calls, etc... STOICAL seems to address all of these, but it's written in dense C code that I can't make heads nor tails of... but the ideas are really, really attractive. http://stoical.sourceforge.net/documentation.php http://stoical.sourceforge.net/documentation.php The stand out features for me 'string puts a string on the stack (along with a type flag for string 'cube : dup dup * * ; is how you would define cube, which is a bit different, but not a huge shift He's got ways to do types, dictionaries, arrays that also look like stacks... all sorts of magic including networking! How much of it could be crammed into something that boots inside of a VM?

timonoko 6y ago

The reason might be that there is nothing new to invent or explore so they wallow endlessly in old dried-up shit. Forth is particularly useless, because it only truly made sense in fixed-width computers, where one word was equal one symbol and list of symbols was on separate paper tape. It was so sweet compared to Fortran that I still have cavities in my brain.