I wish people would quit promulgating Forth.

Sorry, but it is not a production language. It is a puzzle language. Many things which are straightforward in even the worst programming language are a brain teaser to figure out how to organize in the "Forth Way(tm)".

Scheme and Lua come closest to my ideal.

However, I just can't deal with 1-based indexing from Lua. Sorry. Too many things talk to C API's.

Scheme is okay, but almost none of them are truly small anymore. Even the ones like picobit (https://github.com/stamourv/picobit) require quite some grunty support from a desktop machine outside the processor.

Shame no one told NASA what a useless language Forth is.

http://web.archive.org/web/20101024223709/http://forth.gsfc....

I would be very interested to hear from someone using Forth in production (especially for something like the above link) on their personal experience wrt its advantages compared to other available options.

one of my very first jobs we had products for monitoring underground petrol tanks and petrol (gas, even though it's not a gas ;-) ) pumps. All written in forth, while a bit obscure, actually was quite cool.

as an aside, The guy who was primarily responsible for that now has a FRP library ( http://sodium.nz/ ) and written a book on FRP using petrol pumps as an example

It was also used for some of the drivers of a probe in the Rosetta mission (I think, at the very least it was a probe made by the ESA)