I honestly love posts about Forth (or Factor) and Common Lisp (or Lisps in general). I love both languages. On top of that, I use C a lot, along with OCaml, Lua, and Erlang (and rarely Ada). I find each one of them beautiful. :)
Sweet! I learned to program by writing a Forth compiler. Was an excellent way to learn. I only discovered Lisp much later, and definitely like what I see, but haven't gotten around to learning it properly yet.
Interestingly, Lisp people think that Lisp doesn't have much syntax -- Forth has even less. It's basically words separated by spaces, and that's it.
Is it just me, or has Forth been getting quite a bit of mention recently? Perhaps it's because the Forth-derived Factor language is getting more popular.
Wow! That's wonderful!. Forth and Lisp were my favorite languages long long time ago. Python is my current daily use language among others. I even don't know they are connected.
The parallels between Forth and Lisp seem painfully obvious to me, but I’ve had knowledgeable programmers here tell me I’m hallucinating when I say that. I really need to spend more time with both.
Thanks for the recommendation. I had never heard of Forth, except as a buzzword, until I heard a local hacker give a short explanation of Factor, which is largely inspired by Forth:
I played with the demo a bit. It's very interesting. Even in the first few minutes you can sense the potential power of its super-spartan stack-based syntax, though if you're the kind of person who hates Lisp because it doesn't have the C syntax your head will probably explode at the sight of Factor or Forth.
Nice to see more interest in Forths and concatenative languages lately on HN. IMO they’re even more amenable to metaprogramming than Lisps, and there’s a lot of power in a compositional, interactive style of programming, especially for a low-level language with no safety nets. I definitely recommend playing around with a Forth (I like Gforth) or Factor, and trying to absorb some of the philosophy—it’s helped improve my program design in other languages.
Forth seems to have one thing in common with Lisp: a small dedicated following that believe it's the way forward and considerably easier to learn, despite never really having taken off.
I suspect this is something to do with different ways of conceptualising programs.
Forth is a beautiful language. Just like Lisp, Smalltalk, and others have a comeback, I won't be surprised if the same happens soon with Forth as well.
Forth is Lisp, but with composition as the basic operator instead of application. The result, of course, is a wildly different language but one which inspired the same degree of fanaticism among its adherents in their search for simplicity and elegance.
Yeah. It seems to get overlooked a lot. Forth clicked for me easier than Lisp. It still requires you to build out a lot unless you build it on top of higher level languages.
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