
Forth Lessons - lelf
http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Forth_Lessons
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smoyer
We built a couple products using PolyForth in the '90s ... I didn't hate it
but I'm not really interested in returning to coding in a Forth dialect (maybe
on uP and uC). On the other hand, I learned a lot about programming in general
which seems to happen every time I use a language that isn't C-like.

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jgeada
Forth was a cool language when I was a learner programmer, when I was coding
for myself, by myself.

As soon as I matured and needed to work in large code bases with a team of
people, the very properties that made Forth interesting became major
handicaps: the programming model is to grow the language towards your problem.
This generally leads to a one off quirky personal language, and worse, one per
programmer or group on the team. Without draconian control this quickly
becomes a morass of mutually unintelligible code. In many respects, Lisp
languages often suffer the same problem.

In OO languages, a weaker version of this can occur, where different groups of
people end up with different classes and objects with some mutual redundancy;
however in that case, other than code duplication and resulting
inefficiencies, the code remains mutually intelligible.

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eggy
You plan on creating Tetris this way, or it is in one of the lessons? I have
only created one small application in Forth for work over the years, but I
love toying with it. Factor [0] and retroforth [1] are lots of fun.

[0] [https://factorcode.org/](https://factorcode.org/)

[1] [http://retroforth.org/](http://retroforth.org/)

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unixhero
Tetris in the Openfirmware Bios, on PowerPC architecture, yay!

