3 ms·

Here are some great resources on Forth: http://www.call-with-current-continuation.org/articles/forth.txt http://www.call-with-current-continuation.org/articles

Here are some great resources on Forth: http://www.call-with-current-continuation.org/articles/forth.txt http://www.call-with-current-continuation.org/articles/forth... https://git.sr.ht/~vdupras/duskos/tree/master/fs/doc/design/simple.txt https://git.sr.ht/~vdupras/duskos/tree/master/fs/doc/design/... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9TJuOwy4aGA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9TJuOwy4aGA Let me quote the first essay at length: > Writing "good" Forth code is very hard, or at least what I consider good Forth code, which may be different from what others consider good. Forth has been called a "write only language", but only because it requires an additional effort to simplify your code to a point where everything becomes obvious. This is an art, it is a moment of transcendence, which I don't claim to have ever reached, but sometimes I get a glimpse of it, an inkling of the fact that if I would work very hard on this, it will become so simple, so heavily factored, using such obvious and clear names that everything just falls into place. It is this moment that programmers experience every once in a while, where a short, simple piece of code just does what it is supposed to do, without any extra baggage, easily understandable. To achieve it in Forth is much harder, it may require more time, many rewrites, but the results are even more satisfying, as the result is smaller, much simpler, fully self-contained and not burdened by code that you can not trust. When you forget about that urge of productivity, which has become the moloch we sacrifice our children to, you may be able to achieve that particular thing that is called quality, elegance, art. It may take a lifetime, you may never reach that far, but still you should strive for it. > Or you remain a cog in the machine, developing on absurdly convoluted "software stacks", using inadequate and brittle languages, connect barely matching interfaces to only small parts of too many bloated libraries, using insanely sophisticated tools of incomprehensble complexity and trot on, asking yourself why everything sucks and why the last time you actually enjoyed programming and were you could be genuinely and deservedly proud on what you accomplished, was when you were a kid... It seems to me that a lot of ideas in mainstream computing are pointing towards dead ends, and the practice of software engineering is either stagnating or in decay. Maybe it's time for a more radical reconsideration of how we build software, and time to give Forth (or something like it) a more serious look.

hayley-patton 4y ago
I would not hold my breath for it to revive software engineering, if the end result is purportedly to make a pretty program. No doubt quality is severely lacking in modern programming, but programming is a means to ends other than autoeroticism. And Forth is nothing new as a low-level, bending-over-to-the-machine language [1], except that its users to have constant urges to decry everything else as bloat (first link), civilisation-threatening, training wheels (third link), and all those wonderful things. Just don't do anything [0], and hoorah, you can write nothing too. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28771886 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28771886 is a classic on that topic. [1] Bemusingly this does not make it necessarily fast; some Forthen are too simple and too low-level for compilers to get much done, c.f. https://applied-langua.ge/posts/i-dont-want-to-go-to-chel-c.html#orgf7a8a86 https://applied-langua.ge/posts/i-dont-want-to-go-to-chel-c.... for the video described in the third link.

hayley-patton 4y ago

I would not hold my breath for it to revive software engineering, if the end result is purportedly to make a pretty program. No doubt quality is severely lacking in modern programming, but programming is a means to ends other than autoeroticism. And Forth is nothing new as a low-level, bending-over-to-the-machine language [1], except that its users to have constant urges to decry everything else as bloat (first link), civilisation-threatening, training wheels (third link), and all those wonderful things. Just don't do anything [0], and hoorah, you can write nothing too. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28771886 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28771886 is a classic on that topic. [1] Bemusingly this does not make it necessarily fast; some Forthen are too simple and too low-level for compilers to get much done, c.f. https://applied-langua.ge/posts/i-dont-want-to-go-to-chel-c.html#orgf7a8a86 https://applied-langua.ge/posts/i-dont-want-to-go-to-chel-c.... for the video described in the third link.