My history with Forth and stack machines (2010)

http://yosefk.com/blog/my-history-with-forth-stack-machines.html

by mbrubeck • 12 years ago

99 17 12 years ago

yosefk.com

viach2• 12 years ago

Btw there is an interesting resource about the concatenative languages http://concatenative.org/

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

swah3• 12 years ago

If the Forth paradigm was to be popular, it had its chance recently: 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.

Dewie• 12 years ago

You talk about Factor as if it (community, development, ecosystem, etc.) is practically dead. Is it?

viach2• 12 years ago

It might be that the problem is not in Factor itself, but in how is it positioned and marketed?

klibertp4• 12 years ago

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.

chubot• 12 years ago

I've played around with this paradigm a bit for the last few years.

To put it briefly: for many programs the style is extremely elegant and compositional; for others it's just plain awkward. In those cases it's not just hard to read for beginners; it's hard to come up with the program and maintain it.

Factor has lots of great ideas, but takes them way too far! The object system is supremely awkward IMO. It's basically as if you grafted an object system onto bash. Yeah you could imagine some way it can work. But both the syntax and semantics just clash with the original paradigm. And you should just use a different language if you want the OO paradigm.

The concatenative style works better as a little language than for general purpose programming.

kabdib• 12 years ago

Well, the utterly exposed stack of FORTH makes it nearly impossible to write clear and maintainable code.

I've been going through some old papers and ran across the version of FORTH that I wrote in 1979. I had thought it was pretty whizzy; it compiled to inline machine code, had a screen editor a little like Emacs and some other neat stuff. And the FORTH code was utterly unreadable compared to the kernel of Z-80 assembly that provided all the primitives.

I've had other experiences with FORTH and other exposed stack languages (usually little domain-specialized engines used as extension systems), and the result has been uniformly horrible. As in, "I wish I had done something else." Or worse, "I wish my cow-orker had chosen some other language, because I want to kill him now." Argh.

There are concatenative languages that have real expressions and real memory management, but I've never tried them; I imagine they're a real improvement.

klibertp4• 12 years ago

my cow-orker had chosen some other language

I don't know if it was intentional or not, but I'm soo gonna use it next time I'm talking about the choice of a language for a project... :-)

james_hague• 12 years ago

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.

klibertp4• 12 years ago

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.

go435g• 12 years ago

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

My history with Forth and stack machines (2010)

Related Stories