Around 1980, while still a Stanford student, I used Laboratory Microsystems' PCForth to write a editing/publishing system for SAT math preparation, complete wit

Around 1980, while still a Stanford student, I used Laboratory Microsystems' PCForth to write a editing/publishing system for SAT math preparation, complete with embedded figures and equations and animated answers. The 'aha' at the time was to store the graphics not as bitmaps, but as a stream of parameters that were interpreted, allowing my system to save hundreds of quiz questions on a single floppy. That vector approach also made editing objects and layers trivially simple. Got the attention of ETS and Addison Wesley, both of whom flew me out to demonstrate how I did it. But when I started building my own software product to sell and support, adding things like one of the first networked learning management systems and a homemade graphics windowing system (schools were MSDOS or Apple II in the day, if you wanted a GUI you built one) I switched everything over to C even though that meant teaching myself C and re-architecting everything from scratch. Creating and working with abstraction layers was critical to that project's success, and simply not doable in Forth. So I've always thought of Forth as kind of like a first girlfriend - maybe not "The One" but a delightful and important phase that helped me learn what was important to me.