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Forth is a notorious "write-only language", it's hard to decipher what your code is doing after you've written it. As someone that spent a couple of years dabb
by fouc 5y ago
Forth is a notorious "write-only language", it's hard to decipher what your code is doing after you've written it.
As someone that spent a couple of years dabbling in forth before moving on to Ruby, I became a lot more appreciative of the sheer readability of Ruby, and ruby-inspired languages like coffeescript & elixir.
However I still have a soft spot for the ethos of Chuck Moore. Abstractions are something that we should be wary of as programmers.
- joeberon 5y agoI tried it, and it felt more like a fantasy computer game, like TIS-100 or something, rather than a real language. It felt neither easy to write nor read, and I'm not sure what problem it solves with "software" in general that other languages don't. Ruby is a great language for sure, and actually it has some of the DSL capabilities of Forth
- fouc 5y agoYeah that's one of the most intriguing parts of Forth I thought, the everything-is-a-DSL, the metaprogramming, the language-is-a-bytecode-VM, etc. I feel lisp is very similar, an inverted sort of forth, I've never tried lisp but it seems to be a much easier language to work with than forth.
- astrobe_ 5y ago> it's hard to decipher what your code is doing after you've written it. Not in my experience. I even recycled "throw-away" scripts - thing that were written as "write-only" - a couple of times. I also continuously improve my dialect, so sometimes I break the utilities I've made for work. One of them has been working 24/7 for years (probably longer than your time playing with Forth), during which I have modified it to better fit my evolving needs more than a couple of times.