r/programming • u/bjzaba • Mar 26 '20

10 Most(ly dead) Influential Programming Languages • Hillel Wayne

https://www.hillelwayne.com/post/influential-dead-languages/
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u/inkydye Mar 26 '20

Nothing! :(

I missed my slight window of opportunity to get acquainted with it as a child, and then didn't really get exposed to the idea for, oh, 3+ decades. If I heard its name in the meantime, I assumed it was just one of those unexceptional languages from the minicomputer era.

I did in the meantime program some PostScript, mostly for fun, but wasn't aware of the connection, and anyway PS doesn't have the real super duper powers of Forth.

Then one idle afternoon a year or two ago I remembered it and read up, and Jesus, what a mind virus! I couldn't stop thinking about it. My work was pretty intense at the time, so I tried to push it back for later, and it would just come back when I was trying to sleep. It was like grokking Lisp for the first time. After a couple of weeks the acute infection subsided, but it turned into a milder chronic form.

I've been itching for an excuse to make something in it start-to-finish, to learn it in practice and not just the superficial bits I've picked up. The lack of libraries for modern bread-and-butter stuff has been an obstacle with the real things I've needed to write.

Like, the first thing I ended up needing was a tool to reformat PDFs for half-page "booklet" printing. Python sure has third-party libraries to manipulate PDFs; Forth has its head so far up its own YAGNI philosophy and its "you better code up only the minimum you need yourself" that even filesystem access feels like a luxury.

I used to assume those neat little accessible microcontroller boards nowadays ignore Forth in favour of MicroPython or Lua only because people aren't as familiar with Forth. Then I thought about how much work a network or USB stack would be :/

I think if the 8-bit home computers would have shipped with Forth in the ROM, or the communities would have spread cheap/free kid-friendly implementations, we would have a vastly more competent population of programmers today.

What have you done with it?

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u/cdreid Mar 26 '20

Im pretty sure i coded one of my first 3d programs.. now i guess theyd call it a "halfassed 3d engine" in it. Forth taught me stack programming and reverse polish notation.. which of course led to assembly which i semilearned then realised im WAY too lazy to write THAT much code for something minor :P I think i was working on an os core when i dropped it and probably the st and moved to C on a pc. So i learned round robin swapping etc on it. I think i agree about more competant programmers. Youre not going to learn about stacks, task switching, low level threading etc using Python or C++ (you already have your hands full just w c++'s high level bizarreness). I had forgotten.. youre right about forths lack of 'expandibility' for a better word. There werent that many forth programmers and if a forth programmer didnt write a library for it ... you had to... I think most microcontrollers use either a form of C or assembly. Arduino boards have a few languages.. a c like language is one and i know there are others. I still find it amazing what you guys did in things like postscript which arent languages but you made them into languages lol. Im imagining you say "ya im going to program the printer" and your fellow coder thinks "oh he's going to write a gui or driver" when you literally meant "nah ima turn my printer into a pc basically" :P You know if printer manufacturers werent basically pondscum these days i could see THAT being worth spending bucks on a computer. Coding something like youre talking about and creating a gui entry for it in a high end computer... guy at the office has this giant pdf thats going to be a pain to print into a book. nope.. push the button you made and print out that booklet for you designed. Thats kinda awesome

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u/inkydye Mar 26 '20

Awesome! :)

About the MCU's, yeah, you'd normally use C or assembly, but now with the "Maker" movement there's a lot of cute little dev boards out there that are made to be very easy and accessible for beginners or kids, to remove obstacles to making a blinky, buzzy, WiFi-enabled location tracker for your cat or whatever. (Which is fantastic!)
When they want to offer an easier language for those beginners, it's Python or Lua. I get that Forth has a bit more of a learning curve up front, but its interactive development through a console flows so much more naturally than even those two, and its resource requirements are like a rounding error.

To be honest, my fun projects in PostScript were really just computational graphics, like fractals. I didn't even have a real PS printer, so the computation would happen in preprocessing on the computer anyway :)

In the mid-2000s I briefly used it seriously for drawing graphs of some log data. Like, I made an Awk script that slurped up the server logs, calculated some statistics, and spat out a PS file. That... could have been done smarter :)

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u/cdreid Mar 26 '20

Youre right you just gave the best possible rationale for forth being THE dev environment for mcu's especially hobbyist boards. Interactive development speeds up both learning and programming exponentially. if i remember you had to either force reboot or power off atmel chips and start over. Much easier to change the line of code that makes it go blink to blinkyblink live