

Starting Forth - karim
http://home.iae.nl/users/mhx/sf.html

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silentbicycle
The sequel, _Thinking Forth_ (<http://thinking-forth.sourceforge.net/>) is
available free online, in PDF form. (After going out of print, it was scanned
and OCR'd with the author's blessing...quite a compliment.) It's less about
how to program with Forth, and more about things Forth taught Leo Brodie about
designing programs for maintainability, (re)factoring, and the like.

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paulhart
My first summer job while at University was with a small company in the west
of England, Micross (<http://www.microssautomation.com/index.php>), writing
industrial laundry control software, in Forth, targeting Windows NT. We used
the MPE Forth system (<http://www.mpeforth.com/>), which was highly extensible
- when you needed to add more of the Win32 API, you'd edit various files that
shipped with the package and recompile the entire thing :)

The company had standardized on Forth throughout their operation, so
regardless of the hardware you were using, anything from a PIC-based counting
system to the Windows servers, you only needed to know one language to
understand the code. Clever stuff.

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joe_the_user
I have never used Forth but it seems like a really language. It combines very
high level constructs with the ability to be embedded in systems that barely
have an operating system.

Now, if they could solve the problem that every Forth system is customized by
the Forth programmer and so the entire language lacks standards, it would be
amazing. Also, if you could add enough syntactic sugar to make it look sort-of
like C or perl, you would have "the next big thing".

~~~
jwilliams
Take a look at <http://factorcode.org/> \- it's very Forth-like, but has a lot
of modern constructs. It's very active and the (core) libraries are quite
stable.

~~~
vsingh
I've been toying with Factor for about a week. It's been an enjoyable
experience, as both the language itself and the included development
environment are extremely well designed.

Having never played with Forth-like languages before, I'm finding writing even
the simplest algorithms strains my mind -- in a good way, though. It's mind
expanding in the same way Lisp was the first time.

I doubt that Factor is the next big thing, but I think that for smart people
it's one of the most fascinating things around right now. Zed Shaw, for
example, is a big fan:

<http://blog.cusec.net/2009/01/16/zed-shaw-on-factor/>

~~~
jwilliams
Yeah - Forth and Forth-likes encourage an extremely modular, concise,
expressive form of coding... When you add macros it gets some of that meta-
programming feel that comes with Lisp.

All that said - I've never found it 100% natural, but (perhaps paradoxically)
on the other hand I'm usually pleased with the results.

~~~
vsingh
No kidding! Take a look at this code I wrote for adding a node onto a binary
tree:

[http://img301.imageshack.us/my.php?image=addtobinarytreescre...](http://img301.imageshack.us/my.php?image=addtobinarytreescreenshjq2.png)

It is shown compared to the analogous code in C++ and Lisp.

My Factor version could probably be improved. In fact, I just now realized
that I could have factored out the two final calls to <node> into a single
call.

