If you like Forth, but find it challenging to build real stuff with, Factor (https://factorcode.org/) is most or all of the good stuff about Forth designed in a way that's much easier to do things with. It was designed by Slava Pestov (who I think had a big hand in Swift), and honestly it's a lot of fun to build webapps and other programs with, and much less brutal to read than Forth can be.
By rpcope1 2 hours ago
I've had a soft spot for Forth and am toying with a silly Forth-like interpreter for web programming ... if not for actual use, at least for some fun time. One concept it adds is the notion of a "current selection" which can define the available vocabulary to use and is used to select and work with DOM elements. Just experimenting.
Edit: As a kid, I disliked BASIC as a language though it let me do fun stuff. So I made an interpreter in BASIC for a language I'd like and it turned out Forth-like (and I didn't know about Forth at that time). I guess I'm still that kid some 35 years later.
By sriku 34 minutes ago
Many people glorify the simplicity of Lisp as an interpreter, but Forth is similar and underappreciated. Sadly, the only code I've written in Forth is... PostScript. Yeah, PostScript is a dialect of Forth. As a child, I really was amused by the demo of GraFORTH on Apple ][, which included 3D wireframe animations, which at the time were magical.
By nikolay 3 hours ago
> As a child, I really was amused by the demo of GraFORTH on Apple ][, which included 3D wireframe animations, which at the time were magical.
I originally wrote GraFORTH (https://archive.org/details/a2_GraFORTH_1981_Lutus_Paul) to escape the slow world of integer BASIC on my first computer (an Apple II). Because it relied on large blocks of assembly code to produce nice graphics, it perhaps misled people about what Forth could do on its own.
Innocent times, different world, before the personal computing tail began wagging the dog.
By lutusp 15 minutes ago
Why is it that languages like this don't scale? It's not the first time I see a powerful language that got forgotten. Other examples include SmallTalk and Common Lisp (tiny community).
It is because some languages are "too powerful"? What does that say about our industry? That we're still not that advanced of a specie to be able to handle the full power of such languages?
I say that because it seems languages that are "dumbed down" seem to absolutely dominate our world (Python, Ruby, JS, etc.)
By behnamoh 4 hours ago
Sadly our industry carries mostly about brick layers and usually tries to go into technologies that make it easier to deal with employees like replaceable servants at low wage prices.
The large scale salaries SV style isn't something that you will find all over the globe, in many countries the pay is similar across all office workers, regardless if they are working with Git, or Office.
By pjmlp 2 minutes ago
I'm not entirely sure this is different from other languages but I believe a common complaint about lisp is every solution ends up writing a DSL for that solution, making it hard to understand for anyone else. So it's a super power if you're a small team and especially if you're a team of 1. But if you're a large team it doesn't scale.
By socalgal2 7 minutes ago
One simpler explanation: in forth you are forced to keep the stack, and modifications to the stack, in your short term memory, albeit only really three numbers in most cases. Whereas with C et al you simply look down the page at the variables, far less taxing on your short term memory.
Well-written and designed high-level forth words often transcend that and tend to be, quite literally, readable however, in a way that is incredibly rare to see in C et al. Of course the argument is that other programmers shouldn't be expected to see the problem in the way the original problem solver did.
By tarkin2 3 hours ago
This is probably why you see things like locals get used a lot as modern Forth programs grow. It doesn't have to be brutal early days Chuck Moore genius programs, but I guess you start getting away from the original ethos.
By rpcope1 2 hours ago
I worked at a place that had a big Forth codebase that was doing something mission critical. It was really neat and cool once you finally got it, and probably hundreds or maybe thousands of people had touched it, worked on it and learned it, but the ramp was pretty brutal for your average developer and thus someone decided it would be better to build the same thing over with a shitty almost-C-but-not-quite interpreted language. It certainly made it easier for more people to understand and build, even if the solution was less elegant.
By rpcope1 2 hours ago
That sounds interesting! Do you have any tips for us on how to use Forth effectively? What was the codebase?
By kragen 2 hours ago
I don't think "power" is really that helpful a metric in determining how useful a programming language is. If you think of programming from the standpoint of trying to specify the program you want out of all of the possibly programs you could write, one of the most helpful things a programming language can do is eliminate programs that you don't want by making them impossible to write. From that standpoint, constraints are a feature, not a drawback.
By saghm 3 hours ago
And at the extremes, too much power makes a tool less useful. I don’t drive an F1 car to work, I don’t plant tulips with an excavator, I don’t use a sledgehammer when hanging a picture. Those tools are all too powerful for the job.
By zovirl 27 minutes ago
What I heard is with Forth, basically no 2 environments are alike, but highly customized, meaning every forth programmer creates his own language in the end for his custom needs.
So collaborating is a bit hard like this. The only serious forth programmer that I know, lives alone in the woods doing his things.
So from a aesthetic point of view, I really like the language, but for getting things done, especially in a collaborative way?
But who knows, maybe someone will write the right tools for that to change?
By lukan 3 hours ago
This is not a real issue, because the same thing can be said about C. No two C projects are the same, each has its own set of libraries, macros, types, etc.
I think the main problem is that Forth systems don't have a standard way of creating interfaces like C and other languages have. So the diversity of environments becomes a big issue because it's difficult to combine libraries from different sources.
By coliveira 35 minutes ago
It kinda happened with markup languages. HTML, SVG, and some other domain specific markup languages are all XML, which is a subset of SGML.
The thing there is those DSLs have their own specs.
Coding is a social activity. Reading code is hard. When there are multiple ways of doing things, it's extra hard. People want to have relatively standardized ways of doing things so they can share code and reason about it easier.
If there's a lisp or racket or a forth that's defined as a DSL, it might take off if it's standardized and it's the best solution for the domain.
By mcdonje 3 hours ago
HTML uses a ton of SGML features not part of XML (sometimes erroneously though to be non-standard ‘tag soup’, not to mention self-closing tags). You need either a specialized parser or an SGML processor + DTD.
By gldrk 3 hours ago
Wasn't HTML4 the last one defined as a SGML DTD? 5 and on is its own beast.
(rip XHTML)
By shawn_w an hour ago
I think those other languages have real advantages you aren't seeing.
It just tells you the top N words by frequency in its input (default N=100) with words of the same frequency ordered alphabetically and all words converted to lowercase. Knuth's version was about 7 pages of Pascal, maybe 3 pages without comments. It took akkartik 50 lines of idiomatic, simple Lua. I tried doing it in Perl; it was 6 lines, or 13 without relying on any of the questionable Perl shorthands. Idiomatic and readable Perl would be somewhere in between.
#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use strict;
my $n = @ARGV > 1 ? pop @ARGV : 100;
my %freq;
while (my $line = <>) {
for my $w ($line =~ /(\w+)/g) {
$freq{(lc $w)}++;
}
}
for my $w (sort { $freq{$b} <=> $freq{$a} || $a cmp $b } keys %freq) {
print "$w\t$freq{$w}\n";
last unless --$n;
}
I think Python, Ruby, or JS would be about the same.
Then I tried writing a Common Lisp version. Opening a file, iterating over lines, hashing words and getting 0 as default, and sorting are all reasonably easy in CL, but splitting a line into words is a whole project on its own. And getting a command-line argument requires implementation-specific facilities that aren't standardized by CL! At least string-downcase exists. It was a lark, so I didn't finish.
(In Forth you'd almost have to write something equivalent to Knuth's Pascal, because it doesn't come with even hash tables and case conversion.)
My experience with Smalltalk is more limited but similar. You can do anything you want in it, it's super flexible, the tooling is great, but almost everything requires you to just write quite a bit more code than you would in Perl, Python, Ruby, JS, etc. And that means you have more bugs, so it takes you longer. And it doesn't really want to talk to the rest of the world—you can forget about calling a Squeak method from the Unix command line.
Smalltalk and CL have native code compilers available, which ought to be a performance advantage over things like Perl. Often enough, though, it's not. Part of the problem is that their compilers don't produce highly performant code, but they certainly ought to beat a dumb bytecode interpreter, right? Well, maybe not if the program's hot loop is inside a regular expression match or Numpy array operation.
And a decent native code compiler (GCC, HotSpot, LuaJIT, the Golang compilers, even ocamlopt) will beat any CL or Smalltalk compiler I have tried by a large margin. This is a shame because a lot of the extra hassle in Smalltalk and CL seems to be aimed at efficiency.
(Scheme might actually deliver the hoped-for efficiency in the form of Chez, but not Chicken. But Chicken can build executables and easily call C. Still, you'd need more code to solve this problem in Scheme than in Lua, much less Ruby.)
—·—
One of the key design principles of the WWW was the "principle of least power", which says that you should do each job with the least expressive language that you can. So the URL is a very stupid language, just some literal character strings glued together with delimiters. HTML is slightly less stupid, but you still can't program in it; you can only mark up documents. HTTP messages are similarly unexpressive. As much as possible of the Web is built out of these very limited languages, with only small parts being written in programming languages, where these limited DSLs can't do the job.
Lisp, Smalltalk, and Forth people tend to think this is a bad thing, because it makes some things—important things—unnecessarily hard to write. Alan Kay has frequently deplored the WWW being built this way. He would have made it out of mobile code, not dead text files with markup.
But the limited expressivity of these formats makes them easier to read and to edit.
I have two speech synthesis programs, eSpeak and Festival. Festival is written in Scheme, a wonderful, liberating, highly expressive language. eSpeak is in C++, which is a terrible language, so as much as possible of its functionality is in dumb data files that list pronunciations for particular letter sequences or entire words and whatnot. Festival does all of this configuration in Scheme files, and consequently I have no idea where to start. Fixing problems in eSpeak is easy, as long as they aren't in the C++ core; fixing problems in Festival is, so far, beyond my abilities.
(I'm not an expert in Scheme, but I don't think that's the problem—I mean, my Scheme is good enough that I wrote a compiler in it that implements enough of Scheme to compile itself.)
—·—
SQL is, or until recently was, non-Turing-complete, but expressive enough that 6 lines of SQL can often replace a page or three of straightforward procedural code—much like Perl in the example above, but more readable rather than less.
Similarly, HTML (or JSX) is often many times smaller than the code to produce the same layout with, say, GTK. And when it goes wrong, you can inspect the CSS rules applying to your DOM elements in a way that relies on them being sort of dumb, passive data. It makes them much more tractable in practice than Turing-complete layout systems like LaTeX and Qt3.
—·—
Perl and Forth both have some readability problems, but I think their main difficulty is that they are too error-prone. Forth, aside from being as typeless as conventional assembly, is one of the few languages where you can accidentally pass a parameter to the wrong call.
This sort of rhymes with what I was saying in 02001 in https://paulgraham.com/redund.html, that often we intentionally include redundancy in our expressions of programs to make them less error-prone, or to make the errors easily detectable.
By kragen 2 hours ago
The article in CACM that presents Knuth's solution [1] also includes some criticism of Knuth's approach, and provides an alternate that uses a shell pipeline:
With great respect to Doug McIlroy (in the CACM article), the shell pipeline has a serious problem that Knuth's Pascal program doesn't have. (I'm assuming Knuth's program is written in standard Pascal.) You could have compiled and run Knuth's program on an IBM PC XT running MS-DOS; indeed on any computer having a standard Pascal compiler. Not so the shell pipeline, where you must be running under an operating system with pipes and 4 additional programs: tr, sort, uniq, and sed.
McIlroy also discusses how a program "built for the ages" should have "a large factor of safety". McIlroy was worried about how Knuth's program would scale up to larger bodies of text. Also, Bentley's/McIlroy's critique was published in 1986, which I think was well before there was a major look into Unix tools and their susceptibility to buffer overruns, etc. In 1986, could people have determined the limits of tr, sort, uniq, sed, and pipes--both individually and collectively--when handling large bodies of text? With a lot of effort, yes, but if there was a problem, Knuth at least only had one program to look at. With the shell pipeline, one would have to examine the 4 programs plus the shell's implementation of pipes.
(I'm not defending Pascal and Knuth, Bentley, and McIlroy are always worth reading on any topic -- thanks for posting the link!)
Bringing this back to Forth, Bernd Paysan, who needs no introduction to the people in the Forth community, wrote "A Web-Server in Forth", https://bernd-paysan.de/httpd-en.html . It only took him a few hours, but in fairness to us mortals, it's an HTTP request processor that reads a single HTTP request from stdin, processes it, and writes it output to stdout. In other words, it's not really a full web server because it depends on an operating system with an inetd daemon for all the networking. As with McIlroy's shell pipeline, there is a lot of heavy lifting done by operating system tools. (Paysan's article is highly recommended for people learning Forth, like me when I read it back in the 2000s.)
By mek6800d2 21 minutes ago
frankly it's a miracle any of them scaled at all, such popularity mostly comes down to an arbitrary choice made decades ago by a lucky vendor instead of some grand overarching design
By elitepleb 2 hours ago
They scale extremely effectively to large problems solved by a team size of one, maybe two.
The story goes that changing the language to fit how you're thinking about the problem is obstructive the rest of the people thinking about the same problem.
I'm pretty sure this story is nonsense. Popular though.
By JonChesterfield 3 hours ago
Back in 2004 or so - ancient days now - I remember an elderly programmer on
#gobolinux (freenode IRC back in the days) who kept on praising Forth. I never
understood why, but he liked Forth a lot.
Now - that in itself doesn't mean a whole lot, as it is just anecdotal, but people
who are very passionate about programming languages are quite rare. I've not seen
something like that happen with any other language (excluding also another guy on
#gobolinux who liked Haskell). I did not see anyone praise, say, PHP, perl, JavaScript etc....
Some languages people don't like to talk about much. Forth though was different in
that regard. I never got into it; I feel it has outlived the modern era like many
other languages, but that guy who kept on talking about it I still remember. His
website also was built in Forth and it was oddly enough kind of an "interactive"
website (perhaps he also used JavaScript, I forgot, but I seem to remember he
said most or all of it was implemented in Forth - turtles all down the way).
By shevy-java an hour ago
it mentions sometimes not naming things as great, but... what does naming intermediate values in forth look like? Is there even a naming scope that would allow for me to give values names in case I don't want to get entirely lost in the sauce?
By rtpg 22 minutes ago
Forth has been a peripheral fascination of mine for about a decade, just because it seems to do well at nearly every level of the software stack. Like a part of me wants to build a kernel with it, or make a web server, or anything in between.
I've never actually done any Forth, though, just because it's a bit arcane compared to the C-inspired stuff that took over.
By tombert 2 hours ago
This is, I think, the best overview of Forth, and computing as a whole, that I've ever seen.
By kragen 3 hours ago
A long read but one that's quite incredible. Has definitely helped my understanding of computing get closer to the metal so to speak.
By fennec-posix 2 hours ago
That is assuming that you, with German grammar, write.
By dlcarrier 3 hours ago
I believe, that you that sumes as mean.
By DavidSJ 3 hours ago
I wish "Simple Made Easy," by Rich Hickey, could be applied here. Forth is simple but not easy. If there is something as simple as Forth but also accessible to mere mortals (aka easy) then I'd like to know what it is (I don't consider Clojure itself as a language to be simple in this sense).
By rpcope1 2 hours ago
By sriku 34 minutes ago
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