> A lot of people go through guides of writing a lisp, I'd love to urge people to try writing a simple Forth interpreter instead, or even something somewhat rel

> A lot of people go through guides of writing a lisp, I'd love to urge people to try writing a simple Forth interpreter instead, or even something somewhat related such as TCL. See, that's the problem. Writing a Forth interpreter, to be blunt, is not writing in Forth. You should be writing applications in Forth, not interpreters. It's great to marvel at the simplicity of a Forth interpreter, until you have to use it in anger for an actual application. I've made several semi-serious "hobby" stabs at working with Forth, and, for me, it's a tough row to hoe. I look at something like F83 and marvel that someone was able to pull that off in that environment. I simply don't think I've used it enough and cross the line where I'm not constantly fighting...something to get anything done and thus my projects (or my patience) get derailed and I move on to something else. I've never gained any real momentum. F83 is actually quite robust (given it platform), and while gForth and such are better, it's not THAT much better. The core language is the same, though there are some more utilities. My Pooh brain may simply not be able to cope with it properly. Could just be me. But a lot of Forth practitioners are kind of tired of all the "Look I have my own Forth" posts, vs actual working code doing something interesting besides Yet Another NEXT. The Forth "enthusiast" community reminds me of the Pharo community. A community focused on writing Pharo to write Pharo, rather than applications on top of Pharo. They're constantly rewriting something (and making great strides!), but in the end you just get a great tool for making a great tool, and nobody (it seems) is making actual projects with it. A lot of folks get a lot of "stuff" done using all sorts of languages and such, and showcase their wares, with the focus being on the application and the problem they solved. Forth focuses on Forths. And I know this is not universal, folks use it every day in industry and such, and there's even a couple nice videos showing "Forth in action", but much of the notoriety of Forth is the simplicity of the system, rather than the applications written on top of it.