4 ms·

I wouldn't call it a failure outside the telescope market. IIRC the first Mac apps were written in forth. There is a forth interpreter for every platform. Quite

I wouldn't call it a failure outside the telescope market. IIRC the first Mac apps were written in forth. There is a forth interpreter for every platform. Quite a few smaller apps for older computers or handheld devices were written in forth. AFAIK it's still used for embedded systems programming. But the language is rather old. The standard was never updated to turn forth into a "modern" language. And then there is the community. Even things like named "function" arguments are scowled at.

kabdib 15y ago
I used MacFORTH back in 1985 because I wanted to get a leg up on Mac programming, and it was one of the few environments that worked on a 128K Mac with two floppy drives. It was awful; I'll note that MacFORTH sank pretty rapidly once even halfway decent IDEs became available. http://www.dadhacker.com/blog/?p=1468 http://www.dadhacker.com/blog/?p=1468 One of the reasons there is a FORTH interpreter for every platform is that it's so easy to port or bring up that it's /always/ an early arrival. It's sure not modern. Unextendeded FORTH has nothing like a heap (just stack-like allocation). I could go on. And yeah, you get yelled at by FORTH purists who see nothing wrong with the language. They can be an interesting crowd to deal with; the most incompetent ones seem to be the loudest and most arrogant about FORTH's universal applicability to everything (and if you can't see this, you're a moran). See earlier comment about projects running late, then killed. [Back in the day, when I was working on database engines at a largish computer company, a manager of mine said, "I've got to go over to building 123 and evaluate a proposal by some people who want to sell us an O(N) sorting algorithm." "Don't they know that's impossible?" "No. They claim they've done it. They got some people in Marketing all excited. They think it could be really big." "Huh." "They've written it in FORTH." (pause) "They're stark raving loonies," I said. Oh, and it was about as miserable and as confused and misguided and very nearly fraudulent as you can imagine. Go figure.]

kabdib 15y ago

I used MacFORTH back in 1985 because I wanted to get a leg up on Mac programming, and it was one of the few environments that worked on a 128K Mac with two floppy drives. It was awful; I'll note that MacFORTH sank pretty rapidly once even halfway decent IDEs became available. http://www.dadhacker.com/blog/?p=1468 http://www.dadhacker.com/blog/?p=1468 One of the reasons there is a FORTH interpreter for every platform is that it's so easy to port or bring up that it's /always/ an early arrival. It's sure not modern. Unextendeded FORTH has nothing like a heap (just stack-like allocation). I could go on. And yeah, you get yelled at by FORTH purists who see nothing wrong with the language. They can be an interesting crowd to deal with; the most incompetent ones seem to be the loudest and most arrogant about FORTH's universal applicability to everything (and if you can't see this, you're a moran). See earlier comment about projects running late, then killed. [Back in the day, when I was working on database engines at a largish computer company, a manager of mine said, "I've got to go over to building 123 and evaluate a proposal by some people who want to sell us an O(N) sorting algorithm." "Don't they know that's impossible?" "No. They claim they've done it. They got some people in Marketing all excited. They think it could be really big." "Huh." "They've written it in FORTH." (pause) "They're stark raving loonies," I said. Oh, and it was about as miserable and as confused and misguided and very nearly fraudulent as you can imagine. Go figure.]