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I used Forth professionally on a number of processors over about ten years. On a couple of them I had to implement the language from scratch, including having

I used Forth professionally on a number of processors over about ten years. On a couple of them I had to implement the language from scratch, including having to write a code editor and other system tools. Remembering those days always makes me smile. I really enjoyed that work. The language is fun to use, fast to code and execute and as flexible as you want it to be. I made extensive use of it in robotics, including designing and building a networked multiprocessor walking robot controller from scratch. Remember, no Internet, Arduinos or SO; just bare chips, data books and your own creativity. My first Forth project was on a 6502.

markus_zhang 4y ago
Thanks for sharing, are people still programming robots in Forth nowadays?
- anta40 4y ago
  I think C/C++ is the popular option nowadays.
  - markus_zhang 4y ago
    Yeah I think so. Thanks.
- adastra22 4y ago
  This one comes to mind: https://www.excamera.com/files/j1.pdf https://www.excamera.com/files/j1.pdf
- robomartin 4y ago
  > are people still programming robots in Forth nowadays? Frankly, I haven't kept up with the Forth community. Back in the day it was really popular in astronomy as well. Lots of observatories used Forth to control their telescopes, etc. The transition to C/C++ was inevitable for a range of reasons. Finding qualified Forth programmers became really hard at some point. For me the transition happened when a friend of mine asked me to help port a Forth codebase to C. The system was used for DNA sequencing by researchers in the Human Genome project. It had become very difficult to maintain and evolve the product precisely due to not being able to find good (or enough) Forth coders. I think that was the last large Forth project I completed, which, oddly enough, involved abandoning Forth in favor or C.
digitalsankhara 4y ago
I also used some Forth professionally. Triangle Digital Services TDS2020 Forth SBCs (Hitachi H8 microcontroller). Also they had a smaller SBC the TDS9092 [1] which I used to turn the bitstream of data from a GPS chipset into NMEA strings. I wrote Modula-2 on DOS for the data loggers and Forth for the embedded stuff. Happy days. [1] https://www.triangledigital.org.uk https://www.triangledigital.org.uk

markus_zhang 4y ago

Thanks for sharing, are people still programming robots in Forth nowadays?

anta40 4y ago
I think C/C++ is the popular option nowadays.
- markus_zhang 4y ago
  Yeah I think so. Thanks.
adastra22 4y ago
This one comes to mind: https://www.excamera.com/files/j1.pdf https://www.excamera.com/files/j1.pdf
robomartin 4y ago
> are people still programming robots in Forth nowadays? Frankly, I haven't kept up with the Forth community. Back in the day it was really popular in astronomy as well. Lots of observatories used Forth to control their telescopes, etc. The transition to C/C++ was inevitable for a range of reasons. Finding qualified Forth programmers became really hard at some point. For me the transition happened when a friend of mine asked me to help port a Forth codebase to C. The system was used for DNA sequencing by researchers in the Human Genome project. It had become very difficult to maintain and evolve the product precisely due to not being able to find good (or enough) Forth coders. I think that was the last large Forth project I completed, which, oddly enough, involved abandoning Forth in favor or C.

digitalsankhara 4y ago

I also used some Forth professionally. Triangle Digital Services TDS2020 Forth SBCs (Hitachi H8 microcontroller). Also they had a smaller SBC the TDS9092 [1] which I used to turn the bitstream of data from a GPS chipset into NMEA strings. I wrote Modula-2 on DOS for the data loggers and Forth for the embedded stuff. Happy days. [1] https://www.triangledigital.org.uk https://www.triangledigital.org.uk