Oh dear. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13058804

The strength of Forth is pretty well highlighted in this post: you are free to create your own thing, quickly. But it makes it entirely personal, non-standard and alien. Yet its simplicity definitely makes it also learnable for people who understand low-level hardware, which becomes less and less common.

It is strange for the time of the story, OP's teammates didn't pick up his system and made theirs (as a team). But yeah. When a guy comes in and is allowed to do things differently and succeed when you didn't because you had to follow arbitrary rules, you have to make a conscious effort not to take a passive-aggressive stance against them and under-estimate what they are using and doing. I know that feeling.

These days certainly aversion to risk makes it extremely difficult to go that route (although Forth, Inc. mentioned in TFA is still alive). The unavoidable complexity of today's software is not really a major problem that the author points out near the end, as you can fight with the same tools as everyone else in Forth, e.g. dealing with a stupidly complex thing like XML by just using one of the zillions of C XML library from Forth.

One thing to mention is that Forth was around the JPL probably because Chuck Moore began his career and created Forth in the astronomy field [1].

[1] https://colorforth.github.io/HOPL.html

He seems to have passed away this year.

https://obituaries.seattletimes.com/obituary/arthur-murray-1...

Sad. He seemed like he had some real intelligence, but also a few wires crossed.