Or to hit more closely, in 1983 or so there was Grammatik https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grammatik https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grammatik , a grammar-checking t

Or to hit more closely, in 1983 or so there was Grammatik https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grammatik https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grammatik , a grammar-checking tool for CP/M (on Z80 so it had a little more power than the 6502) written entirely in Forth - I spent a bit of time prying an interpreter prompt out of it. Consider that the PDP-10 was effectively around 500khz, and the 704 that lisp was invented on (and gave us the CAR and CDR names) "could execute up to 12,000 floating-point additions per second". It was a couple of years before Pascal and C really caught on for micro development, but it really wasn't the barren wasteland of raw machine code that you seem to be suggesting...