Re:Historical recreation/restoration of original Forth on th...
by richard_shelton on Sunday March 18, 2018 @02:55PM
(#16613586)
I have programmed for years with Forth and I really think it was not a wasting of the time for me. I had very interesting Forth-related job, I became more proficient in PL design/compilers-related things because of Forth.
Alas, I don't think that Forth is very relevant today in the professional SW development. But it's still a great teaching tool. I would like to see, for example, a PL design course where first pages would be about META II and Forth implementations.
Modern programmers need more examples of beautiful, miniature software architectures. Tools like Forth are especially interesting, because they show us that even a single developer may do great handcrafted things and he doesn't need to depend on third-party tools, IDEs, frameworks for it. Charles Moore haven't invented Forth from scratch, he "synthesized" it from some really great ideas of 50-60s, like Lisp, B5000, APL etc. Moore took only those parts, which were good components (simple to implement, understand, combine) to build his own independent tool. N. Wirth uses the similiar approach, by the way.
Maybe today we could repeat the same synthesis/minimisation process with some modern ideas/technologies to create a beautiful tool for a modern programmer - lone craftsman. Or maybe the whole "tool-making" (see Whole Earth Catalog etc) movement is just a thing from the past?
Re:Historical recreation/restoration of original Forth on th...
by exikyut on Sunday March 18, 2018 @09:16PM
(#16615533)
META II appears to have been a DSL that used a more straightforward equivalent of BNF and transpiled/metacompiled it to a RPN-parsing VM. It was built around 1963.
Alas, I don't think that Forth is very relevant today in the professional SW development. But it's still a great teaching tool. I would like to see, for example, a PL design course where first pages would be about META II and Forth implementations.
Modern programmers need more examples of beautiful, miniature software architectures. Tools like Forth are especially interesting, because they show us that even a single developer may do great handcrafted things and he doesn't need to depend on third-party tools, IDEs, frameworks for it. Charles Moore haven't invented Forth from scratch, he "synthesized" it from some really great ideas of 50-60s, like Lisp, B5000, APL etc. Moore took only those parts, which were good components (simple to implement, understand, combine) to build his own independent tool. N. Wirth uses the similiar approach, by the way.
Maybe today we could repeat the same synthesis/minimisation process with some modern ideas/technologies to create a beautiful tool for a modern programmer - lone craftsman. Or maybe the whole "tool-making" (see Whole Earth Catalog etc) movement is just a thing from the past?