
My history with Forth and stack machines (2010) - mbrubeck
http://yosefk.com/blog/my-history-with-forth-stack-machines.html
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viach
Btw there is an interesting resource about the concatenative languages
[http://concatenative.org/](http://concatenative.org/)

I personally wonder why there is no modern popular language from this family.

~~~
swah
If the Forth paradigm was to be popular, it had its chance recently:
[http://factorcode.org](http://factorcode.org)

Factor is modern, has a single implementation, with an optimizing compiler,
high quality libraries, a great interactive environment.

Factor got so much love from Slava Pestov and a tight community (that I
believe still mantains it) for a few a years - it was beautiful thing to see.

Its just that most programmers don't want to code in it.

~~~
klibertp
> Its just that most programmers don't want to code in it.

Most programmers don't want to code in APL, Prolog, Haskell or Scheme either.
Most programmers don't want to even consider writing Smalltalk or Clojure or
F#; and they _won 't_ _ever_ touch Idris, even if they somehow knew it
existed.

I get a feeling that most programmers just plainly don't want to program at
all, that they'd be happier doing something better-specified, more solid, like
painting walls or something.

I don't believe that getting "most programmers" to use some language or other
should be the goal. Creating better tools for people who want to use them
should take priority over trying to simplify the tools to make them more
accessible to those who don't want them. If the tool is really good then
someone will make it "user friendly" sooner or later, and "later" really isn't
a problem here and in most cases means about 20 years.

I'm not involved with Factor community, but I was under an impression that its
users are people who understand that. It would be a shame if they got
discouraged by the lack of "mainstream adoption" and stopped working on it
after a mere "few years". That's not even enough to tell if the idea is really
good or bad.

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pjc50
_If the tool is really good then someone will make it "user friendly" sooner
or later_

I disagree. User-friendliness is like security: it's not something you can
paint onto the system afterwards, it's a more fundamental property. There's
certainly value in building experimental systems and tools to explore ideas,
but at some point you have to consider the question of getting the ideas out
to the wider community. And the key to that is pragmatism.

People clearly aren't as stuck as you think; tools like Ruby or node.js or the
cambrian explosion of javascript frameworks show that. But those have traction
because you can show people your own rapid success with them.

If someone's rapidly delivering high quality publicly usable applications with
a novel technique, people _will_ notice.

~~~
klibertp
> tools like Ruby or node.js or the cambrian explosion of javascript
> frameworks show that

Ruby appeared in 1990, JS in 1994 (iirc?). Saying they got "widely" (that's a
relative term) adopted 15-20 years later is not going to convince me that
"people aren't as stuck as I think".

Meanwhile we're still waiting for ideas from '60 and '70 to get to the
mainstream. No, I _really_ think people are a bit conservative when it comes
to tools they use.

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james_hague
Every time this article crops up I stop and read the whole thing, word for
word. Not only does he nail the beauty of and fundamental trouble with Forth,
but it's a deep ramble through a world in the way that the best New Yorker
pieces are.

~~~
klibertp
I do the same, but only today I read the whole discussion below the article. I
don't know how I could miss it before - it's as good as the article, even if a
little less structured.

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go435g
what's his problem with semicolons and the en dash?

