Definitely a good read. Some of my favorite quotes from it:
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To this day, I find it shocking that you can define defining words like CONSTANT, FIELD, CLASS, METHOD - something reserved to built-in keywords and syntactic conventions in most languages - and you can do it so compactly using such crude facilities so trivial to implement.
Quote:
True, I guess, and equally true from the viewpoint of someone extensively using any non-mainstream language and claiming enormous productivity gains for experts. Especially true for the core (hard core?) of the Forth community, Forth being their only weapon. They actually live in Forth; it's DIY taken to the extreme, something probably unparalleled in the history of computing
I found this interesting:
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Chuck Moore constantly tweaks the language and largely dismisses the ANS standard as rooted in the past and bloated.
because before the ANS standard, people were complaining that there's no effective standard (I thought the '83 standard plus a lot of things in common usage and documented in Starting Forth, Thinking Forth, Forth Dimensions, and other publications were enough of a standard), and then when the ANS standard came along, it seemed to give Forth more credibility
outside the inner circles. I've added some things from ANS, but I don't like being confined to some parts of ANS. Fortunately, in his book "Forth: The New Model," Jack Woehr said it's not the committee's intention to
force anyone to comply.
Edit: Jeff Fox has a great article entitled "ANSI Forth is ANTI Forth" at
http://www.ultratechnology.com/antiansi.htm, and Chuck Moore, the inventor of Forth agrees. See why.
continuing:
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My experience is, you try to compress the 3 absolutely necessary layers to 2, you get a disaster. Have your algorithms people talk directly to your hardware people, without going through software people, and you'll get a disaster. Because neither understands software very well, and you'll end up with an unusable machine. Something with elaborate computational capabilities that can't be put together into anything meaningful. Because gluing it together, dispatching, that's the software part.
So you need at least 3 teams, or people, or hats, that are to an extent ignorant about each other's work. Even if you're doing everything in-house,
We seem to have a good combination here on this forum.
and finally,
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I still find Forth amazing, and I'd gladly hack on it upon any opportunity. It still gives you the most bang for the buck - it implements the most functionality in the least space. So still a great fit for tiny targets, and unlikely to be surpassed. Both because it's optimized so well and because the times when only bacteria survived in the amounts of RAM available are largely gone so there's little competition.
Reading all the comments would take a long time, but although I only scanned the first 10-20% of them, I found them favorable.