>>Forth is a million languages that solve almost nothing." :-P

That brings us to the question, when it was invented and people did use it. What kind of problems were they solving with it?

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jonjacky 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

Forth was invented around 1970 for controlling equipment in an astronomical observatory, running on a PDP-11, a 16-bit computer with up to 64 Kbytes of memory. Its heyday was the 1970s and 80s, when it was mostly used for small embedded systems on 8- or 16- bit processors with 8 kb -- 64 kb of memory. It was possible to run an entire Forth development system along with the application on these small targets without resorting to a bigger computer for cross-development.

The usual alternative to Forth on those systems was assembly language.

	▲	EasyMark 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		I was dropped into one such system after it failed after like 20 years and learned forth on the fly while managers breathed down my neck lol. Not a fun experience, and it took about 3X as long as I thought it would take, so Forth is not my favorite language, but I do see why it was useful at the time, and as an exercise in a way of thinking about languages rather than the mode I usually operate in c/c++/rust/little javascript

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failingforward 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Forth started as Chuck Moore’s solution to the problem of how to bring up an interactive programming environment on hardware with limited memory. The base of the system used a small number of primitives written in assembler or machine code upon which more complex functions were built. The genius of the system was that you could easily bring it up on different hardware by translating the primitives, which was quite helpful at a time when software was frequently customized to the hardware (which itself was not as standardized as today). Nowadays Forth is probably most useful on embedded systems.

	▲	bxparks 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		> Nowadays Forth is probably most useful on embedded systems. Nowadays almost nothing is written in Forth. That's the problem with Forth. Even on 8-bit Arduino microcontrollers with 2kiB of RAM, we write programs in C++ (with a little bit of C, on top of hand-coded AVR assembly).

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s-macke 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

The Starflight role-playing game for DOS [0] was written in its own Forth dialect. Even today, it remains one of the games with the strongest Star Trek feeling.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starflight